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Largest Object in the Universe Discovered
prostoalex writes "Quick, think of the largest object you can imagine. Whatever your imagination delivered it probably wasn't an 'enormous amoeba-like structure 200 light-years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas,' a newly found object, as USA Today reports."
I have a particaular objection to the title. "The Largest Object" makes it sound like we know we will never find anything bigger. With the size (infinite?) of the universe, I find that impossible to believe. A better alternative title: "Largest object known to date is 100M LY across"
Sorry to bitch and moan, but it pisses me off when people are so damn loose with the english language.
Also: How is this important? So it's big. What now?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
But by the very nature of the supposition that we are part of something larger, that means that the larger thing may not be bound by our own rules.
Playing sort of fast and loose with the definition of "object," aren't they? I generally think of an object as a single item, not a collective. If this is an "object," then why isn't the universe itself an object? And if the universe is an object, then it's necessarily larger than this one.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
The problem with pseudoscientists such as yourself is that your thinking is limited by what you know.
So what if the fastest information can travel is the speed of light? If this 200-million-light year-wide amoeba is, say, a small part of the being, problems of entropy and decay may not be relevant. How long will the larger structures of such a being persist? What are the structures of such a being?
Imagine a species of "being" existing on the scale of what we call the quantum. Applying what is knowable about the world of the quantum to the world of the molecular would mean that our macro world could not exist. Such beings would say, "the ravages of quantum mechanics and particle decay and instability would not allow such beings to exist." They would be both right and wrong. The world we normally observe cannot be extrapolated from the world of the subatomic. Lucky for us, our world is an empirical fact.
Concerning the grandparent's ideas which you so cavalierly dismiss according to what you know about your sub-universe scale, those ideas are unproven and perhaps unlikely. What is not unlikely is the empirical fact that our universe is part of something whose dimensions and larger nature is UNKNOWABLE TO US
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I've got some stoner logic for you "Woah man, what if there was, like, this kind of person who was really smart, and like totally understood math and science concepts, but like, is totally stupid when it comes to dealing with people. Like they're just plain condescending and rude."
On the other hand, your logic for the existance of macro or micro organisms holds weight.
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I think they mean that the individual galaxies and gas clouds of the object are gravitationally bound to one another. They measure the velocities of the objects and can see that they are less than the escape velocity for the mass as a whole, just like the stars in a globular cluster.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning