[HN Gopher] Nearly 1k mysterious strands revealed in Milky Way's...
___________________________________________________________________
Nearly 1k mysterious strands revealed in Milky Way's center
Author : raattgift
Score : 425 points
Date : 2022-02-01 07:04 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.northwestern.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.northwestern.edu)
| Shadonototra wrote:
| we perhaps live inside an atom that lives inside an atom that
| lives inside an atom that lives inside and atom that lives inside
| an atom
|
| everything is a matter of point of view and perspective
| WediBlino wrote:
| Petrova Lines?
| hoseja wrote:
| Those were spectral lines.
| johnjungles wrote:
| Amazing book
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54493401
| nkozyra wrote:
| I found the concept pretty goofy when I was reading it but
| then I had to stop and remind myself that not only do I know
| shockingly little about the universe, our greatest experts
| do, too.
|
| Whatever fantastical concept we can imagine likely exists in
| some iteration out there.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| I liked the concept, but the execution was ... lacking.
| Some aspects like language (hopefully not spoiling too
| much) seemed to me treated very naively.
| nkozyra wrote:
| I do agree on that, I wasn't a huge fan of the
| storytelling which did a lot of belabored hand-holding
| and did indeed feel like an amateur who did just enough
| research to treat the reader like a naive student.
|
| That's a hard trick to pull, though. How do you tell an
| expert's tale without a) getting too technical for most
| or b) getting to ELI5 for the few?
| tasubotadas wrote:
| It's the Webway! https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Webway
| pndy wrote:
| No no, it's clearly the Splitstream -
| https://andromeda.fandom.com/wiki/Slipstream
| amelius wrote:
| Looks like DNA strands. We're part of a big cell ...
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Is it puzzling that they all seem to be aligned / orientated
| perpendicular to the galactic plane - they are not randomly
| orientated at all.
|
| Or at least the ones we see. How would they look like if viewed
| from above?
| misja111 wrote:
| I guess that could be a form of survivor bias; we can only
| detect them well if they have this orientation towards us.
| stargazer-3 wrote:
| They could be aligned with the magnetic field lines around the
| Galactic Center:
| https://media.springernature.com/original/springer-static/im...
| willis936 wrote:
| If they are from accretion disks then it would make sense. The
| average velocity of matter in the milky way is rotational, so
| most black holes should also have rotating dragged frames in
| the galactic plane as matter from different altitudes are
| accreted.
| raattgift wrote:
| There is ample evidence contradicting the idea that the poles
| of pulsars are aligned with galactic north-south.
|
| Indeed, our own solar system is not aligned with galactic
| north-south,
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Motion_of_Sun,_Earth.
| ..
|
| and that is hardly unusual or unexpected:
|
| http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/159-our-solar-
| syst...
|
| And while we don't have many galactic black hole candidates,
| the ones we have and can see beaming are haphazardly
| oriented, and there's no reason why black holes should behave
| differently from their progenitor stars (oriented
| haphazardly) or other compact objects (the pulsars mentioned
| above).
| willis936 wrote:
| The mass of the solar system is moving in the plane of the
| galaxy in a rotational direction. If our solar system was
| accreted by a black hole the solar system would add to
| black hole's dragged frame rotational energy in the
| galactic plane.
|
| What a few puffs of dust that have not reached an energy
| minimum yet do isn't important.
| raattgift wrote:
| As shown in your reply's parent comment which I made, we
| are not moving in the plane of the galaxy.
|
| There is further detail from Ethan Siegel here:
| https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/ask-ethan-37-the-
| earth...
|
| Quoting a tiny fraction that article:
| The Sun appears to move *up-and-down* and in-and-out with
| respect to the rest of the galaxy as it revolves around
| the Milky Way.
|
| (I added the asterisks for emphasis)
|
| Additionally, amplifying my previous comment, almost no
| known black hole candidates' equators are aligned with
| their host galaxies' thin discs, at any redshift.
| willis936 wrote:
| You realize that your quote is a lead-in to talk about
| Earth's procession, yes? You shouldn't suggest that the
| article is claiming that the Sun's galactic orbit is
| outside of the galactic plane, because it isn't.
|
| >The Sun is presently located about 25-to-27,000 light
| years from the galactic center, and makes the shape of a
| simple ellipse around the galaxy.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I wonder if they are the signal of smaller spinning black holes
| that have been whipped by larger ones to near the speed of light
| such that the Hawking radiation is magnetic in nature due to
| spin.
| jacquesm wrote:
| What are the chances of these being an artifact of the
| observation equipment?
|
| Just like you can have all kinds of optical aberrations, does the
| same go for radio based observations?
|
| For instance, isn't it odd that most of them happen to lie in the
| vertical direction of this particular observatory across many
| lightyears of distance?
| jcims wrote:
| (not an expert in this, just a fan) Always a possibility and RF
| is generally more prone than visible light to artifacts, in
| part because its much harder to eliminate from the environment.
|
| However, in this case the brighter filaments have been observed
| for decades, the wide angle view of this image is from 1989
| from the VLA array in New Mexico with some data augmentation
| from Spitzer space telescope.
|
| https://public.nrao.edu/gallery/the-center-of-our-galaxy-2/
|
| The MeerKAT study just increases the resolution and signal to
| noise ratio, which has allowed us to see many more of them, but
| we can see the 'old' ones as well. The emission phenomena is
| pretty well understood AFAIK, the mystery just being mostly
| when/why/how they got there.
|
| The other thing to keep in mind is that these filaments are
| huge in the night sky. The image we see is a mosaic of many
| observations that spans 3.5 x 2.5 degrees. The moon is ~.5
| degrees, or about the same size as that giant bubble on the
| lower right.
|
| Here's the paper. I just scanned through it and its relatively
| approachable - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.10541.pdf
|
| Edit: Check out the section 'OBSERVATIONS AND DATA PROCESSING'
| lovecg wrote:
| The image is a mosaic of many observations and the "puzzles
| pieces" line up so to speak. It's not a single snapshot.
| augustl wrote:
| I'd love to read more about this, in all aspects of
| astrophysics!
|
| It's not that I doubt that astrophysicists take this into
| account, I'm sure they do! But when we see an "image of a black
| hole", that's really a gazillion data points from a multitude
| of different observatories, processed by human made algorithms
| with human made models and biases, and it happens to look just
| like we expected - how do we know it's not just our assumptions
| that made it into the processing and modelling?
|
| Again, I'm sure every astrophysicist ever has thought about
| this and knows how it's handled, so it's not a criticism. I'd
| just love to read more about it, as a layperson :)
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| > Stretching up to 150 light years long, the one-dimensional
| strands (or filaments) are found in pairs and clusters, often
| stacked equally spaced, side by side like strings on a harp.
|
| Are they really one-dimensional or is it just relative to their
| 150 LY length?
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| Just when you thought the vastness of space could not get any
| more mind blowing, you learn about filaments and superstructures
| spanning billions of light years.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules%E2%80%93Corona_Boreal...
|
| This one measures 10 billion light years. Now recall that 1 light
| year is about 10 trillion kilometers... tick, tick, tick, boom!
| Mind blown again.
| dncornholio wrote:
| Or one could say the speed of light is pretty slow on the
| cosmic scale
| nefitty wrote:
| I wanted to see this written out so here goes:
|
| 1,000,000,000,000
|
| x 10,000,000,000
|
| -----------------------
|
| 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
|
| Or
|
| 10 ** 22
|
| Aka Ten Sextillion
| [deleted]
| rob74 wrote:
| To stay at the scale of our galaxy:
|
| > _Filaments within clusters are separated from one another at
| perfectly equal distances -- about the distance from Earth to
| the sun._
|
| Does that mean that they are able to distinguish individual
| filaments that are "only" 1 AU apart, but ~ 25 000 light years
| (~1 600 000 000 AU) away from us? Because that would also be
| damn impressive!
| gliptic wrote:
| The angular separation would be only 0.00013 arcseconds, so
| very impressive indeed. Hubble has an angular resolution of
| around 0.05 arcseconds in comparison. Radio telescopes can
| get better angular resolution than that using interferometry
| between distantly separated telescopes. Perhaps that's how
| they can do it.
| Keysh wrote:
| The reported angular resolution (in the main paper:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.10541) is 4 arcseconds. This is
| radio interferometry, which makes for better resolution,
| but it's at a very low frequency (centered around 1.28 GHz
| = about 23 cm), which makes for worse resolution.
| jcims wrote:
| I think they messed up. I quickly scanned and couldn't find
| any reference to what they are talking about in the paper,
| but if you look at the resolutions involved it's much more
| likely they are talking about parsecs, which is defined as
| 'the distance from the sun at which 1 AU subtends a distance
| of 1 arcsecond' or a little over 3 light years.
|
| Paper is here - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.10541.pdf
|
| (Edit:Yes take a look at the images and scale bars on page
| 14)
| jhoechtl wrote:
| When time and space become increasingly intertwined and obscure
| as we are looking towards big bang, I really think that our
| perception of "structure" has to be perceived completely
| differently than we do now.
|
| We witness structure in a 3d space, have to add time to that
| dimension and yet look onto something back in time, when
| commonly agreed fixtures like the fine structure constant might
| have had a different value or not exist at all.
| ignoramous wrote:
| This video on the Great Attractor, which is pulling our galaxy
| towards it, gives a nice overview of superstructures:
| https://youtu.be/0w4OTD4L0GQ
|
| See this excellent video on the scale of the cosmos:
| https://youtu.be/4iC9Qi3y9q8
|
| And this one on how the universe would meet its fate at the
| hands of Dark Energy: https://youtu.be/fdFf5PRPE9g
|
| This one on the emptiness of the universe is quite fascinating
| as well: https://youtu.be/BCjWmfWq0pU
| herodoturtle wrote:
| Thanks so much for these links.
|
| Just watched the first one and it was great.
|
| Looking forward to the rest.
| sharkweek wrote:
| Here's another fun one - a time lapse of the universe:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA
|
| Basically suggesting that if our universe was a human life,
| we'd still be in the hospital right after birth. So much time
| left to go.
| ok_computer wrote:
| I like these two from the authors of the Laniakea super
| cluster paper in 2014
|
| Nature: https://youtu.be/rENyyRwxpHo
|
| Contributing Author: https://youtu.be/Ayj4p3WFxGk
| eXpl0it3r wrote:
| Working link:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules%E2%80%93Corona_Boreal...
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| Thanks!
| go_elmo wrote:
| Thats totally ungraspable for human brains, mind blowing! Thats
| 10^23 kilometers, the same order of magnitude as the avogardo
| constant, means e.g. 14 gramms of carbon correspond to about
| 6.22 * 10^23 atoms of carbon, its the same magnitude to some of
| the larger smallest things...
| holoduke wrote:
| You can a bit actually by scaling down everything. Imagine
| earth is the size of a grain of sand. Nearest star would beat
| approximately 4000km away. Light would travel at 0.3m/sec.
| Moon is only 4mm away. The sun only 16 meters.
| a_e_k wrote:
| I think you're missing a zero and must mean 0.03 m/s for
| light. Otherwise, your other distances have the wrong order
| of magnitude in terms of light-seconds.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Even 0.003 m/s, since the moon is about one light secon
| away.
| maybeOneDay wrote:
| and how long is this strand in question?
| zimpenfish wrote:
| In this model, the sun is 16 metres away and is 8 light
| minutes in real money.
|
| The strands from the article are 150 light years which is
| seventy eight million, eight hundred and ninety four
| thousand light minutes (78894000lm) or nine million,
| eight hundred and sixty one thousand, seven hundred and
| fifty times the distance of the sun (9861750x) which
| gives us 16mx9861750 or one hundred and fifty seven
| thousand, seven hundred and eighty eight km (157788km).
| About 40% of the way to the (real) moon.
|
| If you mean the Hercules Great Wall, 10 billion light
| years is five quadrillion, two hundred and fifty nine
| trillion, six hundred billion light minutes
| (5259600000000000lm) which gives us six hundred and fifty
| seven trillion, four hundred and fifty billion
| (657450000000000x) times the distance to the sun which
| would be ten trillion, five hundred and nineteen billion,
| two hundred and million km (10519200000000km). Or "quite
| big".
| maybeOneDay wrote:
| Love it, thanks. Turns out it isn't actually very
| realistic to approximate the Hercules Great Wall.
| Astonishing
| badrabbit wrote:
| What exactly is it?
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| These numbers do not mean anything. Our mind can naturally
| process small numbers (units, then "it is a small group", then
| "it is a big group").
|
| One million, when not attached to something tangible, cannot be
| processed. A house is one million euros - that I can get. What
| is one million protons side to side - I have no idea.
|
| Of course, I can _calculate_ that 10^6x10^-15 m is 10^-9 m.
| Right..
|
| Same goes for scale. If I say - twice the width of a tree you
| immediately get an idea. Twide the width of a hair - not much.
| A million times the width of a hair - neither.
|
| So 10^9x10^12x10^3 m = 10^24m, looks it is a lot.
| addaon wrote:
| To claim that the fact that (most?) humans' lack of hardware
| for processing numbers with exceptionally large or small
| magnitudes is equivalent to the numbers not meaning anything
| is... odd. Isn't the whole point of learning, curiosity, and
| even articles like this to assist us in developing our own
| internal software to increase understanding beyond what our
| naive hardware can do?
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I do not understand.
|
| Do you know how large 50000 bacteria side to side are? I
| don't. I can compute the number but these are neither
| scales nor magnitudes I am used to.
|
| 300,000 km seems to be large but I do not know how much.
| About 10 times the perimeter of our planet. But this does
| not say much either.
|
| But when you say "five people in a room, and then two
| joined" you have no problems _processing_ the numbers.
| addaon wrote:
| See, e.g., holoduke's comment in this thread. The main
| tool that I (I'd say "we", but I know that different
| folks visualize differently) have for understanding the
| scale of the universe is analogy. It's absolutely non-
| trivial to understand (grasp / grok / missing English
| verb) this sort of thing -- but it's absolutely possible
| to continue to get better at it, and to comprehend more
| and more as you learn and experience more and more.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| We need warp drive technology ASAP so we can go see what these
| things taste like.
| Maursault wrote:
| You fool! Don't you _realize_ where these filaments come
| from? There 's an old example from a distant galaxy that
| demonstrates their formation. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2hM1tyEL0U&t=1m29s
| irrational wrote:
| Most likely they taste like chicken.
| intrasight wrote:
| Perhaps these strings pertain to a warp drive super highway
| intrasight wrote:
| "And, while Yusef-Zadeh already knew the filaments are
| magnetized, now he can say magnetic fields are amplified
| along the filaments, a primary characteristic all the
| filaments share."
|
| Yup - definitely related to warp drive tech ;)
| JackFr wrote:
| Warp drive contrails.
| zamalek wrote:
| While type 0 civilizations grapple with chemtrails, type
| 3 civilations grapple with magtrails.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Tendrils of intergalactic mind control drugs! Wake up
| space-shaliens!
| andraz wrote:
| Warp drive chemtrails! :)
| nine_k wrote:
| Looks more like a highly scalable railgun.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| If you like thinking about cosmic scales and deep time, Stephen
| Baxter's Xeelee Sequence may appeal (try to look past the
| schlocky name) .
|
| Without too many spoilers, the coarse structure of the universe
| is imagined to be able to be manipulated into tools and
| weapons.
| theWreckluse wrote:
| A structure that's 10 billion light years is crazy, given that
| observable universe Israel itself is 93 billion light years.
| Zenst wrote:
| All this time spent on string theory and we find strands.
|
| "Stretching up to 150 light-years long, the one-dimensional
| strands (or filaments) are found in pairs and clusters"
|
| This is surely very interesting and raises lots of lovely
| questions, found in pairs aspect must be indicative of something.
| Would love to know if the pair's spacing constant. Also, how can
| they be one-dimensional as my understanding is, we would not be
| able to measure them far away if that was the case.
| deepsun wrote:
| Pretty good desktop background picture I have now.
| raattgift wrote:
| See also this very high-res image (7530x4684) of the spectral
| density of the Milky Way in radio, which clearly highlights
| (among other things) these filamentary structures:
|
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/astro_jcm/51847931721
| msaharia wrote:
| This is perfect for a Desktop Wallpaper. Thanks for sharing!
| jiggawatts wrote:
| But it's in Flickr, so all interaction is blocked including
| zoom.
|
| I see about 600x400 pixels of that photo.
|
| What a wonderful Internet we've made for ourselves.
| leijurv wrote:
| There's a download button in the bottom right, if you hit
| Original you get the actual original. Here it is: https://liv
| e.staticflickr.com/65535/51847931721_c3feebd201_o...
| _ph_ wrote:
| I am just wondering what is it that prevents that link to
| open the image in a browser window but forces a download of
| it?
| danielbln wrote:
| Usually it's a HTTP header that's sent to your browser:
| Content-Disposition: attachment
| _ph_ wrote:
| Thanks, I had always wondered why some sites behave
| differently with some file types. A bit annoying, if you
| just want to glance at something for a while but not keep
| it around for longer.
| danielbln wrote:
| There are browser addons that force the browser to ignore
| this header, for chrome e.g. https://chrome.google.com/we
| bstore/search/undisposition?hl=e....
| est31 wrote:
| Or content-disposition as of HTTP/2. Just verified with
| the browser console that it's sending that header (and
| using HTTP/2).
| _a9 wrote:
| Specific to Flickr URLs, its the '_d' at the end. Remove
| it and you can view it normally in the browser. But as
| danielbln wrote, that 'Content-Disposition' header is
| what forces a download in general.
|
| https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51847931721_c3feebd20
| 1_o...
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Probably a courtesy from the website owner to not cause a
| runaway browser tab as it tries to render 60MB of image.
|
| I mean the first internet-connected computers like the
| imac g3 had only 32 MB of memory.
| holoduke wrote:
| Override zoom settings in your browser. A must have on
| mobile. Use it all the time.
| jcims wrote:
| Somehow I rage slapped my way out of that. No idea what I
| did.
|
| I just don't understand the underlying motivation to lock
| things down like that. It like a cortisol fountain and I get
| wholly irrationally unreasonably mad. It's actually funny in
| retrospect.
| the_biot wrote:
| Remember that time Yahoo made Flickr ridiculously slow to
| access from Europe, to the point where it wasn't actually
| usable? Lasted near 10 years I believe. Hah, good times.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| To download this on the iPhone:
|
| - request desktop view
|
| - in the bottom right push the down arrow and select original
|
| - a PNG file will download that you can open and save
| neolefty wrote:
| Thank you! There are high-res versions of the images from the
| article embedded in the PDF (linked in the article) as well.
| (You can use pdfimages to extract them.)
| jl6 wrote:
| This is an incredible image and the filaments are super-
| mysterious. Do you know how large the objects in the image are?
| Are we looking at the whole Milky Way or a very zoomed-in part
| of the center?
| stargazer-3 wrote:
| Zoomed-in part in the center, "1400 light-years across the
| centre of the Galaxy." as a linked paper indicates. Milky Way
| is long, 105700 light years in diameter.
| raattgift wrote:
| Along these lines, why SARAO's MeerKAT radio telescope
| (https://www.sarao.ac.za/science/meerkat/about-meerkat/) is
| the observatory behind this discovery is that it has a good
| view of the galactic centre because of the orientation of
| the Earth and solar system within the galaxy : https://comm
| ons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Motion_of_Sun,_Earth...
| raattgift wrote:
| Judy Schmidt has combined this with Spitzer/WISE infrared data
| to produce the following image, and has added annotations for
| some of the more prominent structures (mostly the radio arc and
| supernova remnants in the galactic centre direction) :
|
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/geckzilla/51854563587/
|
| and the deep link (9144 x 5964, but no annotations) for people
| who have trouble with flickr's UI:
|
| https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51854563587_4446b5cd40_o...
| kumarvvr wrote:
| Never thought about Flickr till now, been almost a decade.
| klyrs wrote:
| Wild. Letting my imagination run free, there's something in
| the radio data, second poof from the bottom, that looks
| like... a contrail? That's not right, but what _is_ that
| thing?
| raattgift wrote:
| I think you are looking at the Mouse Pulsar Wind Nebula
| ("PWN").
|
| Prettier X-ray and radio pictures, and animations :
| https://www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2004/mouse/index.html
|
| A recent summary: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018ApJ
| ...861....5K/abstra... ("famous for its spectacular tail").
| There is a link to the arxiv preprint below the abstract.
|
| Lots and lots of additional papers about The Mouse, with
| its conspicuously long tail, PWN G359.23-0.82, driven by
| its Vela-like pulsar J1747-2958.
|
| https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Heartbeat-of-the-
| Mouse...
| klyrs wrote:
| Awesome, thank you!
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Second link is gone.
| shrx wrote:
| Working for me.
| wil421 wrote:
| Not working for me.
| Infernal wrote:
| Gone for me as well
| [deleted]
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| I think I need to print that out, that's wild.
|
| I'll have to get on my desktop because that site is
| hilariously useless on my mobile.
| m4x wrote:
| That is a strikingly beautiful photo. Thanks for sharing it
| parf02 wrote:
| what is the orange beam in the pictures with the telescope?
| blincoln wrote:
| Most likely a laser guide star[1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_guide_star
| eecc wrote:
| Plasma pinches?
|
| https://www.plasma-universe.com/pinch/
| ncmncm wrote:
| Yes, I would like to know what the plasma physicists can
| suggest. Plasma physics is the hardest kind of physics, so
| plasma physicists have to be better than other physicists. What
| they say deserves more attention.
|
| Most who have found employment actually doing science study the
| sun, I think. But fusion projects divert many of them.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| > Plasma physics is the hardest kind of physics, so plasma
| physicists have to be better than other physicists.
|
| I'm pretty sure this is a joke, but I could use some
| reassurance.
| ncmncm wrote:
| No joke. Quantum field theory seems easy when compared to
| plasma fluid dynamics.
| therealplato wrote:
| 00000000005 wrote:
| All cosmos related reporting must say something like; "these
| strands indicate the possibility of life on other worlds".
| makerofthings wrote:
| Galaxy lightning. Or maybe FTL Vapor trails.
| dicroce wrote:
| Odds these structures can help explain away dark matter?
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| There's something so striking about how non-intuitive these
| strands are. I'm not well versed in astronomy or physics, but
| these seem to go against my mental model of how the galaxy
| organizes itself. They're like massive cosmic aberrations. Though
| now I suppose in time they'll make perfect sense.
| varjag wrote:
| Found them missing strings from the strings theory!
| augustl wrote:
| These sorts of images always makes me wonder about how many of
| the images of the universe we see, are how they look from our
| perspective, vs how they look from "above" etc.
|
| I suppose this one is from our perspective?
|
| How we know that the arms of the milky way are bent when viewed
| "from above"? Imagine if they were straight lines when viewed
| from above. From our perspective, they would appear to be
| spiraling arms, since the light at the far end of the arm would
| take longer to reach us.
|
| I'm not doubting astrophysics here, I'm just a layperson that
| wonders how these things are properly taken into account.
| nbaugh1 wrote:
| I'm guessing, in terms of angle (ie "above" or "our
| perspective"), this is pretty much what you'd see. We collect
| data sitting here on planet earth, so more or less, everything
| we see is from the same vantage point in the universe. The
| overall size and shape of things can be calculated by relative
| motion of objects in space. We also can make educated guesses
| about the shape of our own galaxy by observing others from the
| outside.
| Nition wrote:
| One day humanity will gain the ability to simulate these
| filaments as viewed from directly top-down and discover that
| the lines converge to spell out TEXT GALAXY PLEASE IGNORE.
| Jaruzel wrote:
| Clearly warp-drive signatures.
| albertzeyer wrote:
| Intergalactic chemtrails!
| eleitl wrote:
| These can't be cosmic strings, right?
| zmgsabst wrote:
| I would argue they're galactic, not cosmic strings -- places
| that the quasar formed "loop" excitations which were somehow
| frozen in place when it extinguished.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anyon
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Wow, I had no idea about anyons. What a fascinating concept.
|
| This is probably a stupid question, but how can anything in
| our three dimensional world truly be two dimensional? How is
| that imposed on matter or energy?
|
| I thought we used 1/2/3 dimensions to help ourselves
| understand our world better; like theoretical tools we can
| use on paper or a computer to simulate and explore reality.
| But we actually have 2 dimensional objects in the world?
| WpgRubyDev wrote:
| I don't have a reply to your question but another comment
| above [0] argues that Anyons don't do much to explain this
| particular phenomena.
|
| [0] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30160407
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Sibling makes a good suggestion to read the better physics
| reply, and my response to it.
|
| Anyons don't only exist in lower dimensions: because of how
| knot theory works, we found the simplest cases in a highly
| confined electrons -- but there's higher dimensions analogs
| for higher dimensional knots.
|
| You no longer get anyons from particles exchanging
| position, but rather, from when fields tangle in 2-knots.
|
| However, the rings in a magnetic field form a torus, so
| tangles in the magnetic field can (theoretically) knot
| fairly easily, eg from energies swirls in an accretion
| disk.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Are these "frozen" quasar anyons?
|
| Nobody has ever addressed my question about how the braiding
| you'd expect to form in a quasar would unwind -- and if it
| doesn't, we should expect to find most structures along "cooled,
| inflated" braiding. Which we seem to.
|
| > Explained in a colloquial manner, the extended objects (loop,
| string, or membrane, etc.) can be potentially anyonic in 3+1 and
| higher spacetime dimensions in the long-range entangled systems.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anyon
|
| In particular, the "loops" would be magnetic field lines from the
| singularity to the disc (and back), which would become tangled
| via swirls within the disc as it spiraled inwards. While each
| piece would be small, the total braid would be quite large -- due
| to number of particles and chaotic nature of the disc.
|
| I know a single anyon doesn't weigh much - but is there an
| estimate of "anyonic mass" to the galaxy, stores as tangles?
| raattgift wrote:
| > Nobody has ever addressed my question
|
| Ok, I will try. I have to admit I do not fully understand what
| you are asking.
|
| As noted in the link at the top, it is reasonable to speculate
| that these filaments are related to the activity of the
| galactic centre supermassive black hole. However, we do not
| have a quasar in our galaxy, and it is hard to imagine
| (consistent with evidence from this and similar galaxies at
| various cosmological redshifts) that the Milky Way possessed an
| active galactic centre which subsequently was quenched. Indeed,
| part of the mystery here is that there is a quite weak magnetic
| field permeating the galactic centre, and little outward cosmic
| ray pressure.
|
| The spectral index (more details at
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.10552 SS3.1, "nonthermal radio
| filaments that have broad spectral index distribution as well
| as the steepest spectral index that can readily be discerned at
| high latitudes", cf
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_index although neither
| link is especially friendly to non-experts) is entirely
| consistent with synchrotron radiation, which does not require
| any exotic particles at the filamentary sources of the radio
| emissions. As discussed in SS3.2 of the arxiv preprint, all we
| need is highly accelerated electrons. The mechanism for
| accelerating the electrons is unknown, but there are several
| explanations available that do not require exotic particles.
| SS4.3 discusses several plausible alternatives.
|
| I'm no expert on anyons but I do know how Wilczek described
| them when he first proposed them, and Keilmann's observations
| of his humour, and I struggle to see what problems introducing
| anyons might reasonably solve at these bulk scales.
| Additionally, I do not see how anyonic behaviour -- rather than
| straightforward magnetobremsstrahlung -- could be relevant,
| much less a better description, at the warm temperatures in the
| environments of these filaments and galactic centre molecular
| clouds.
|
| Unfortunately, I don't understand your second last paragraph at
| all.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Wait, how do we get the Fermi bubbles without a period of
| active galactic centre? Or do you mean that there's been no
| large scale jets from our SMBH?
| raattgift wrote:
| "Quasar" goes to luminosity, and our galaxy could never
| have been as luminous as any quasar we know of without some
| mechanism to totally block fast (matter) outflows and
| another to block the quenching of star formation from the
| negative feedback of a highly luminous galactic centre.
|
| Our central black hole is very quiet (as opposed to
| active), at least a dozen orders of magnitude below the
| Eddington luminosity in X-rays. Quasars are at (or a very
| large percentage of) the Eddington luminosity, almost
| certainly for at least Gyr durations.
|
| The Fermi bubbles are interesting, but around luminous AGNs
| (at all redshifts) we tend to find extended outflows in
| ionized ("hibals") and molecular gasses, and afaik we don't
| see anything like that associated with those gammas. AFAIR
| there is also a missing ~ 1250 angstrom restframe peak and
| an associated relativistic wind's redshift (0.1-0.2 c or
| 30-60 Mm/s) leading to line driving. About a decade ago
| there was a fair amount of discussion about the Fermi
| bubbles as evidence of a (not so high) luminosity AGN jet,
| but it seemed to require contrivances to drop in a
| sufficiently massive molecular cloud (~ 10^5 solar masses
| around 10^7 years ago, but don't quote me, not my
| speciality, and I was already convinced about the present
| << quasar luminosity (and no trace of tremendous
| variability or eruptive phase up to considerably more than
| a few percent of the Eddington luminosity) and by the
| stellar population).
| zmgsabst wrote:
| I appreciate the reply, but I think we're slightly talking
| past each other in that you're discussing anyons as a source
| of the emissions from the structure, while I'm saying that
| the emissions are from a classical source aligned to an anyon
| -- the overall structure the radiant gases you're describing
| are attracted to, and source of filament shape. That the
| emissions match synchrotron radiation doesn't distinguish, in
| that we'd expect electrons flowing along/around a loop
| excitation to emit precisely that, right?
|
| I would say that galactic anyons solve a problem:
|
| The toroidal knotting you'd expect around some kind of active
| black hole would produce effects we see, and connects them
| via the same mechanism --
|
| 1. Why galaxies have weird filament structures everywhere --
| gas is settling into loop excitations around the black hole;
|
| 2. Which is also why the galaxy seems unusually bound,
| because pulling it apart places additional strain in many,
| many anyons we can't see or readily interact with (due to
| scale);
|
| 3. While also explaining the same features at a higher scale,
| eg galactic clusters or why so many things like Great
| Attractor look like the intersection of a toroidal knot.
|
| My last paragraph is that it's my understanding some tiny
| amount of energy goes into being the anyon, and hence it has
| mass. So the "braiding" of any system would contribute a
| (small?) mass to it -- and I wanted to see the calculation.
|
| I assume I'm off on a wild chase, but I want to see where the
| math fails for my own education.
| raattgift wrote:
| Additionally,
|
| > [the] Great Attractor look[s] like the intersection of a
| toroidal knot
|
| What? Please explain.
|
| > the galaxy seems unusually bound
|
| Discovered features of our galaxy is about the best
| evidence for Copernicanism that we have. Up to the limit of
| current observation, there is nothing at all physically
| special about the Milky Way for any practical purposes.
|
| We would therefore expect to find filamentary structures in
| other spiral galaxies in our sky, and be surprised (which
| is great for theorists) if they were not there when we
| look.
|
| What do you mean by pulling our galaxy apart? What's the
| mechanism?
|
| Here is where you should write down the maths you are
| hoping someone will check, and here is where you get to
| satisfy your complaint that nobody has ever answered you
| seriously before.
|
| In particular, and please forgive me that I can't think of
| a politer way of putting it, I think you need to
| demonstrate that you have any idea at all about what you
| are talking about in your numbered paragraphs in this
| reply-comment's parent.
| raattgift wrote:
| I'm afraid I'm not much more clued-in now about what you're
| thinking. I'll try my best.
|
| > ... "braiding" of any system would contribute a (small?)
| mass to it -- and I wanted to see the calculation
|
| My best guess is that you are thinking that the ( _far from
| active_ ) black hole in the central parsec of our galaxy is
| somehow lifting mass out of itself and into the wider
| galaxy, and so will briefly discuss that.
|
| A reasonable first step towards the theoretical footing
| behind that is Murata & Soda 2006, in Phys. Rev. D. https:/
| /journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.74.04...,
| "Hawking radiation from rotating black holes and
| gravitational anomalies" (also at
| https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0606069v2) where the scalar
| field (also seen in Hawking 1978) is literally a form of
| "anyon" field. I don't see how the use of the name "anyon"
| helps, however, and the outward flux is going to be small
| -- even very very small compared to the ordinary thermal
| collisions of gas and dust in the galaxy centre, let alone
| the stars there.
|
| I think that means you're on course for an extension to the
| Standard Model of Particle Physics to add in some
| electromagnetically-non-interacting species that decays at
| some distance into electromagnetically-interacting ones,
| along the lines of various dark matter decay models,
| especially those designed to produce "feedback" in spite of
| quiet galactic centres. I don't think this is likely to
| bear fruit, but cf. this blog on DM->tau decay:
| http://honorsfellows.blogs.wm.edu/2011/06/12/decaying-
| dark-m...
|
| > I assume I'm off on a wild chase, but I want to see where
| the math fails for my own education.
|
| I'm afraid I can't join you on your chase, wild or not, but
| I think that the mathematics of black holes is reasonably
| accessible and easy enough to find in a variety of
| textbooks. Coupling an anyon field to it is an exercise in
| quantum field theory on curved spacetime (as in Murata &
| Soda) or perhaps a second-quantization of an electrovac
| solution based on Kerr-Newman. I'm really struggling to see
| how -- given the high temperatures and high particle
| numbers involved -- anything is to be gained by looking at
| the truly microscopic behaviour of the stress-energy
| tensor, even in the very near region of the horizon. I'm
| also struggling to see how such effects relating to our
| central black hole are not totally washed out by processes
| in the bulge or in the thin disc. Our central black hole is
| not only far from active, it is also quite small compared
| to the black holes we find in other galaxies, especially
| Seyferts and recently discovered high-redshift (z ~ 7.6)
| QSOs. There is also a lot of dust and gas along our line of
| sight to the galactic centre, and between these filamentary
| structures and the galactic centre. (A number of these
| filaments are much closer to known radio-bright supernova
| remnants, as detailed in the study, but don't seem very
| different from those far from known SNRs.) There is also no
| evidence for beyond-the-standard-model(-of-particle-
| physics) physics in the discovery of these filaments. I
| don't mind being asked to think about BTSM, but these
| filaments are a very poor justification for that.
|
| Finally, the only knotting I expect around a quasar or
| microquasar are bright spots in the plasma of jets
| consistent with small-angle radiation, and it's hard to
| think of a better explanation than proper motion of the
| source. We see this in stellar-mass X-Ray binaries
| (especially nearby microquasars), for example. The absence
| in extragalactic quasars supports this idea, since the
| proper motion of those sources will necessarily be lower
| than galactic ones by a couple orders of magnitude.
|
| > I want to see where the math fails for my own education
|
| If you care to write down some math now, I promise to at
| least have a look at it and see if I can aim you at some
| additional resources which may be more helpful still.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| I'm asking for resources on the toroidal knotting of the
| large scale EM around black holes, both nearby in the
| immediate accretion disk and from the perspective of the
| galaxy as a whole.
|
| Those knots are (supermacro) anyons, because they're
| tangles in a field that form particle-like excitations,
| though in this case loop like excitations. And what we're
| seeing as weird patterns is gas dancing around those loop
| excitations within the galaxy, eg emitting synchrotron
| radiation as they do.
|
| That would be one explanation of why we find so many
| filaments perpendicular to the galactic plane.
|
| > I'm really struggling to see how -- given the high
| temperatures and high particle numbers involved --
| anything is to be gained by looking at the truly
| microscopic behaviour of the stress-energy tensor, even
| in the very near region of the horizon.
|
| For the same reason that braiding tells us something
| about the behavior of plasma globes -- the topology
| doesn't just "go away", and we need to account for where
| the tangle went. It either fell into the black hole or
| it's still here. For the same reason plasma globe
| filaments only collapse at topological defects.
|
| The precise reason that I think that we can't ignore the
| braiding term is that we're forming an entanglement
| structure between all of those particles -- and while
| it's a jumbled mess, that's precisely why we can't ignore
| its contribution to mass and galactic binding.
|
| I also would point out that this doesn't require any
| extensions to the standard model -- I'm just saying
| something that happens small also happens big: that
| braiding is a fact of the wave equation.
| raattgift wrote:
| > I'm just saying something that happens small also
| happens big: that braiding is a fact of the wave equation
|
| There are multiple sources in the galaxy, so on purely a
| Gauss Law analysis I am pretty sure you are barking up
| the wrong tree.
| _3u10 wrote:
| Are they transwarp conduits?
| flatiron wrote:
| It's the second trisolarian fleet! (Three body problems books.
| Highly recommended)
| l33tman wrote:
| While not directly related to these magnetic strands, but
| regarding superstructure, compare with the latest 2.1 _trillion_
| body simulation of a universe formation, mapped as well as
| possible to the observed universe properties:
|
| https://youtu.be/R7nV6JEMGAo
|
| described at http://skiesanduniverses.org/Simulations/Uchuu/
|
| That's another kind of superstructure, the dark-matter-guided
| scaffold of galaxy formation in the observable universe volume.
| scrdhrt wrote:
| These are wormholes, obviously. On a serious note, beautiful and
| awe-inspiring!
| KronisLV wrote:
| > Among the remaining mysteries, Yusef-Zadeh is particularly
| puzzled by how structured the filaments appear. Filaments
| within clusters are separated from one another at perfectly
| equal distances -- about the distance from Earth to the sun.
|
| Sounds like the wake of shipping lanes, the ships even follow
| regulations to stay a safe distance away from one another,
| though they really should do something about those older
| engines that mess up the landscape for everyone with the wakes.
| If that's not a sci-fi story yet, it probably should be!
|
| I wonder what those actually are, though.
| hoseja wrote:
| It's actually a plot point in The Three-Body Problem.
| KronisLV wrote:
| Oh yeah, Cixin Liu's books are pretty good! Having your
| craft leave trails like that behind would be really bad in
| the context of those books, though.
| [deleted]
| thelittleone wrote:
| Looks almost mycelial to me.
| timonoko wrote:
| One of the strands is Puppeteers' planet constellation, which is
| escaping, because this galaxy is imploding. It takes 10,000 years
| when we know about it, and then it is too late.
| xqcgrek2 wrote:
| Why does northwestern have a press release on a result they were
| not involved with? The new measurement was by South African and
| European scientists.
|
| What a sad bunch of derivative scientific clout chasers.
| pohl wrote:
| God forbid a university's site mentions interesting research
| conducted outside their walls.
| Vrondi wrote:
| If you read the paper, you'd know it was lead by one of their
| researchers.
| lamename wrote:
| The paper pdf notes the first author's sole affiliation is with
| Northwestern.
| simonhamp wrote:
| I'm no physicist, but I do enjoy hypothesising what these sorts
| of things could be.
|
| It's interesting when the question of what is driving electrons
| across these filaments at near-light speed is still open... could
| they be natural accelerators? What if you could ride one of these
| filaments?
|
| Or what if they're like the exhaust trails of an FTL
| vehicle/body? Or something inter-dimensional?
|
| Knowing they're _very_ far away, are we looking for them closer
| to home? Can they even be observed with such clarity if they were
| closer to us?
| mNemoN wrote:
| I had pretty same thoughts about it!
| sbierwagen wrote:
| >what if they're like the exhaust trails of an FTL vehicle
|
| That would be rather depressing, if true. There's only a couple
| strands, so it would seem that FTL travel is very very rare.
| Among the 100 billion stars in our galaxy, only a handful have
| used FTL travel in the last 25,000 years?
| lifeformed wrote:
| Maybe they're highways, scars from millions of ships taking
| the same route.
| simonh wrote:
| Since the strands cut across the galaxy, if they are FTL
| trails whoever left them was probably just passing through,
| in equally spaced formations.
| Razengan wrote:
| How is it depressing if something previously thought of as
| impossible turns out to be possible?
|
| Maybe the costs are *ahem* astronomical, so the tech is
| reserved for very large ships, only needing or affording a
| few trips. You know, like our one ever visit to the Moon.
|
| Maybe they're the tubes connecting gates or wormholes
| carrying a regular traffic of thousands of ships.
| darkwater wrote:
| > You know, like our one ever visit to the Moon.
|
| You know this is not factually true, even if you just
| consider the Apollo project.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Well, if FTL travel were even possible, it would consume
| monumental amounts of energy (current known physics say you
| need an infinite amount to accelerate a mass to v=c), so it
| would have to be an extremely rare event.
| wruza wrote:
| It probably goes down after that, cause you're traveling
| back in time. Just a leverage from Quantum Gods, not a real
| investment. /jk
| tiborsaas wrote:
| The current situation is more depressing that we have zero
| evidence of any life outside Spaceship Earth.
|
| One single evidence of physics breaking aliens would be the
| most cheerful thing in my lifetime.
| Stevvo wrote:
| We have evidence of life on Mars from the Viking landers,
| we just ignored it because it's inconvenient.
| comradesmith wrote:
| I agree. Not because I'd ever hope to meet them in my
| lifetime, but I could know that our people could reach
| those same heights, and in small ways, each of us can be
| part of that story.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| I wonder if they are interference patterns from some massive
| waves interacting.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Came here to ask this. A 1-D artifact with even or periodic
| spacing really suggested an interference pattern to me as
| well.
| Atlas667 wrote:
| Yeah, this is pure uninformed speculation, but what if
| they're the edge of cosmic ray propagation. Where they lose
| most of their energy between stars ans are still bound by
| gravity and just interact with other edges forming resonating
| lines.
| jeffybefffy519 wrote:
| Or Astrophage???
| moralestapia wrote:
| >Knowing they're very far away, are we looking for them closer
| to home?
|
| Not only that but they're also huge. If we were inside one we
| may see them as some sort of an almost uniform, isotropic field
| ... perhaps like cosmic background radiation?
| kumarvvr wrote:
| True, but if another filament, not parallel to us, can
| interact with ours, it will still be visible.
| dnadler wrote:
| The CMB is fairly uniform in all directions whereas this beam
| would appear very red/blue shifted depending on the direction
| you look.
| the_biot wrote:
| > Or what if they're like the exhaust trails of an FTL
| vehicle/body?
|
| Thank you for saying it. I desperately want this to be the
| case.
| mmazing wrote:
| My less than plausible wishful thinking theory -
|
| The balloon structures are civilizations with the ability to
| move at least throughout their local group, the strands are
| results of experimentation for whatever technology allows
| them to do so. :)
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Me too. Even if an alien race that wants to annihilate us had
| them. It would be just awesome to know if it was indeed
| possible to craft such devices.
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| Lines for communication and direct energy transfer at the
| Galaxy's center?
| willis936 wrote:
| It's never aliens.
|
| Black hole accretion disks are my bet. Accretion disks are the
| most hot and violent places we know of. The more powerful the
| plasma dynamo, the larger the magnetic field lines will be.
| Think Van Allen belts but galactic scale.
|
| Electrons move freely along magnetic field lines and they are
| very lightweight. Moving at near light speed along them isn't a
| unique phenomenon. Hell, every TV on the planet until 20 years
| ago used to make an electron beam.
| usrusr wrote:
| And electrons avoid close proximity to each other? But of
| course this is not exactly what we usually call "close"..
|
| But it would fit so well, because those wobbly curves almost
| scream "vortex" to my eyes. Interplay between forces towards
| some sink/collector and repulsive forces amongst the
| attracted, doesn't this almost always end up looking like
| that? If a mathematical pattern can be found across a range
| as wide as bathtub sinks and tornadoes, perhaps we should not
| be surprised to find it on galactic scale as well. But the
| dimensions involved, the fact that this whole thing
| apparently emits sufficient waves/particles for us to detect,
| crazy!
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