this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 135 points 4 months ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 29 points 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The ultimate orbs, and I shall ponder them hard.

[–] militaryintelligence 4 points 4 months ago

I pondered my orb last night

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Would have been, but she didn't fit in the picture

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[–] [email protected] 85 points 4 months ago (12 children)

Astrophysicist here. Yes, space is crazy, but interesting things to keep in mind:

  1. 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.
  2. 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)
[–] shneancy 17 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

:0 how can you be inside a star and not know it? I thought they all had a surface like our Sun

second question, would you even feel the spaghettification? Would the signals from nerves be able to travell up to the brain?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

See my response below to Captain Aggravated about how dilute those large stars are.

It's an interesting question whether anybody would actually feel spaghettification 😁 I actually don't know. You can use physics to calculate the proper time derivative of the tidal forces, but you need biology to define the start (and end...) of the process. My intuition says that it probably happens too fast, so once the tidal forces are strong enough to be perceptible, they grow strong enough to rip you apart before you realize (again, just a hunch).

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (4 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] OrganicMustard 9 points 4 months ago (3 children)

The second one. The image is simulated as how an external observer would see it. It was firstly done for the Interstellar movie.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

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?

Hit the nail pretty hard on the head there

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Documentary watcher here. Isn't the "photosphere" of the star defined by the visible surface? It is my understanding you could be "hundreds of millions of kilometers inside" the corona and not know it, but inside the photosphere?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yes, but red supergiants differ from the sun in that their photospheres are extremely dilute and don't have a sharp transition to the corona. I don't know the details of this particular star but take Betelgeuse as an example (it's probably not particularly large for this catrgory), it's radius is ~640 the sun's per Wikipedia, which gives a volume of ~260 million that of the sun. But it is only x15 times as massive as the sun, so on average ~20 million times less dense.

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[–] UnderpantsWeevil 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I was under the impression that the time it would take you to get spaghettified would render the fear of such an experience irrelevant, as you'd be long dead of natural causes before then.

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[–] [email protected] 71 points 4 months ago

what's crazier: you'd need many side by side monitors to show our solar system at this scale

https://www.joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html

[–] [email protected] 59 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You load 618 ton, and whattaya get? Another light year older and deeper in the event horizon.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 months ago (2 children)

St. Hawking don't you call me 'cuz I can't go...

[–] Astronauticaldb 9 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I oweeeeeee my Sol to the black hole...

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[–] TankovayaDiviziya 30 points 4 months ago

*cosmic dread intensifies

[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Pondering orbs again, are we?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

What tf do you mean again?? Explain yourself heretic!

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm in this picture..and I like it.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I knew lemmy was growing but this is far out, man.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago

Yes.. approximately 18.2 billion light-years out (⁠☞⁠ ͡⁠°⁠ ͜⁠ʖ⁠ ͡⁠°⁠)⁠☞

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (2 children)

i can never comprehend these

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago (2 children)

You're nothing and nothing matters and that's ok. It's beautiful.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

the scale is absurd for my monkey brain, its impossible for me to "get" it at all.

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[–] militaryintelligence 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (4 children)

I had a stroke trying to understand this

[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Big things big. Bigger things VERY big.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

The problem is the layout.

It needs horizontal dividing lines to show that the bodies are presented in pairs at the same scale.

When you first look at it, it seems like all six are in one picture at the same scale, then you start noticing things appearing twice, and think "hang on that's not right" and work it out, but just two lines would have solved it immediately.

Design, people! Design!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

No that was instantly clear to me after I read the repeating names

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

For you, maybe it was.

The point of good presentation and design cues is that they can make information instantly clear to almost everyone, no matter if their brain is the size of TON 618, or not.

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[–] MimicJar 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

O <--- Sun Earth ---> .

O <--- Stephen Sun ---> .

O <--- Tom Stephen ---> .

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[–] Anticorp 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Earth small. Sun bigly. Other sun biglier. Black hole bigliest.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] A_Union_of_Kobolds 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Sounds like some shit the Culture does

[–] sulgoth 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)
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[–] lettruthout 6 points 4 months ago (3 children)

That's it... I'm not getting out of bed today.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Why doesn’t the big star simply eat the smaller stars?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

Now compare TON 618 with Phoenix A.

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