Slashdot Mirror
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."
But what's a few orders of magnitude among friends?
It looks like we've got the Immunity Syndrome.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Something 200 light years across is not big (on galactic scales). TFA says the structure here is 200 million LY.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
It's even bigger than Bono's ego!
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
First of all, the structure is 200 million light years across. The distance from the Sun to the center of our Galaxy is about 26,000 light years, so 200 light years would not be very impressive in comparison.
Also, the article is somewhat misleading itself, as the blob isn't really a homogenous structure. It's just a group of galaxies packed together more closely than other clusters. So it isn't really that much different from other parts of the Universe.
Remember that was the largest known object in the universe millions and millions of years ago. Who knows what it would look like today.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
it's almost as big as my wife!
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
"The structure we discovered and others like are probably the precursors of the largest structures we see today which contain multiple clusters of galaxies" :D
So they found Windows Vista code repository...
Largest object in the universe and full of hot gas
And yea on the 7th day G-d rested, after taking his gas-x ; )
*ps.. i am SOOO going to hell!
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
"That's no moon......" /starwars
throw new NoSignatureException();
The largest object that I can imagine quickly is the Universe . It's taking longer to imagine the Multiverse as a single object, but it's even more fun.
--
make install -not war
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.
Stuck to the lens of the telescope.
How does this compare to The Great Wall, discovered as a structure in 1989?
I imagined an enormous amoeba-like structure 201 million light-years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yog-Sothoth
We are doomed!
No sig for the moment.
Well as stated by others the milky way is 90,000 or .09 million light years across.
:)
SO if its 2000 times as big as our galaxy and we are just NOW being able to see it. Its probably REALLY REALLY far away.. I would guess!
Another note our cluster of galaxies called the Virgo cluster which containes most of the visible galaxies such as Andromeda is 100 million light years across.
n/t
Well its all about prespective. From our distance it appears as one object. I'm sure if you asked a molecule if he was part of an object with the next molecule he would disagree. :)
"Space is big - really big - you just won't believe how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. You may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."--Douglas Adams
Fear the coming of the Great White Handkerchief!
What, isn't that supposed to be "Your momma"?
... and here's the actual press release for the discovery in case you want some more meat than given by the simplified USA Today article.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
What's next? A giant space crystal coming to attack Orion?
I bet it was written in java.
I've seen this before. The only way to protect ourselves is to detonate an antimatter bomb inside its nucleus.
What is the criteria by which we call something a 'single' structure? If it's stuff bound by gravity, doesn't gravitational force equally attract everything in the universe? Do we consider stuff bound to itself by one of the other primary forces a single entity?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Did nobody else think of CowboyNeal, or are all those jokes getting modded down?
They say the mind is the first thing to
Whoops, sorry. Forgot to zip up...
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
blog
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.
postmodernsideshow.com
Interesting that it uses the line 'theoretical big bang' though. Am I being paranoid here or is USA Today covering itself against Creationists? Just seems rather odd to underline theoretical like that.
It wouldn't be good for the object if they started firing missiles at each other.
Bonds are broken; bonds are created. Free radicals come into existence, start mucking everything up and are eventually soaked up. And life goes on, one way or another.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Sure-- that's just what most astronomers expect happened. Remember that when we look really far away, we're also looking really far back in time, back far enough that we're starting to be able to see somethings about the universe before many of the galaxies which exist today existed.
The big questions are about things like how uniform was the distribution of the initial gas, when star formation first started happening what kind of stars appeared, and whether the first stars did interesting things like blow up in nova/supernova-type events, or become giant black holes like many galaxies seem to have, and what that would mean for the clouds of gas and the galaxies being formed from it, etc.
"The human race's favorite method for being in control of the facts is to ignore them." -Celia Green
The largest object in the universe has to be an instance of some MFC class.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
If this thing combines with the smug cloud from George Clooney's Academy Award acceptance speech, we're all doomed!
I, for one, welcome our new multi-hundred-thousand light year diameter, bubbly gaseous amoeba-like alpha blob overlords.
:wq
That's what they told me it was - that's why I got on this ship along with all the other telephone sanitizers...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks