This is what machine learning is useful for. Not to try to convince you that oranges are active and potatoes are passive, or to give you a thumbs up with 7~8 fingers. But to detect patterns and allow automation of repetitive tasks.
That’s how alot of these discoveries seem like. Partly it’s just science reporting hyping up anything that happens, but then for many of these astronomical discoveries, it’s just a couple of pixels on a screen. And then somehow they can infer all sorts of things about it based on that. It’s just mind-blowing to think of all the data they can get from that about stars that are millions of light years away.
I would like to understand how they infer these things without becoming a science major. Is it just math equations based on what they think is the distance to the planet and then more math based on what they think the atmosphere is, and so on? Because they can’t actually see the planet.
I can’t explain this one, but I’d like to offer some other identifiers used. When searching for likely planets, they observe stars for wobble in their position. Large planets like jupiter and Saturn have some hefty pull on our own star. The common orbital point between them, called the barycenter, is still inside the sun, but their great distance apart pulls that barycenter closer to the edge of the sun. Our sun has a pretty notable wobble as a result. That’s the kind of thing they look for elsewhere. If there’s no other star causing the wobble in a binary system, then it must be a planet pulling it.
By estimating the mass of the star by various observations of color, brightness, and brightness variation, they can do some “easy” algebra to calculate the size of the affecting planet. From there, they can scan for radiation frequencies in the darkness where they think a planet is sitting. Water has a frequency, hydrogen has a frequency, oxygen has a frequency, helium, etc. By stuffing objects close to home, we can extrapolate that info and apply it to further objects with some confidence. This is how organic compounds were discovered in Venus’ atmosphere.
A lot of it is based on what we have at home, meaning we’re largely looking for what we have and then identifying it as the same. There is uncertainty about some details, but that’s how it always goes with science. It’s always being updated. It’s takes a lot of creativity to imagine what else might be out there and to devise how to look for it. Black holes are a pretty notable example. Since they’re not observable directly, what do you look for? Well, you look for other things being eaten and hope the matter is hot enough to throw a lot of radiation. 80 years ago, they were just an idea. Now we have images of a few galactic-center black holes. Some have been observed free floating through space by distorting the apparent position of stars behind it. Do we absolutely know it was a black hole? No, but that’s what solid theories can identify it as given the darkness and huge mass required to cause that kind of effect. But, as a result, estimates for dark and cold objects vary greatly because they’re the hardest to observe. There’s talk of finding more “hot jupiters” than expected, but it’s totally valid that maybe wevre just missing the cold Jupiter’s because they’re hard to see.
I thought the torus shape was the accepted theory? Guess I haven’t been keeping up on this.
Near the bottom of the article they mention that if the universe wasn’t flat, we would see multiple copies of the universe in the sky. I’m not sure that is exactly true? Given the speed at which the universe is expanding, especially during the early period after the big bang, it seems reasonable that the light from most stars wouldn’t have had a chance to loop back around yet. Even the light from the earliest stars is just reaching us, so I don’t know why they think it would have had time to loop back around multiple times, unless there’s something I’m missing?
And nothing in the article really touched on the “holes” mentioned in the title. Are they referring to the center of a torus, which isn’t really a hole that we could observe? I don’t get it.
in the first year of observations as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), we found many hundreds of candidate galaxies from the first 650 million years after the big bang. In early 2023, we discovered a galaxy in our data that had strong evidence of being above a redshift of 14, which was very exciting, but there were some properties of the source that made us wary
In January 2024, NIRSpec observed this galaxy, JADES-GS-z14-0, for almost ten hours, and when the spectrum was first processed, there was unambiguous evidence that the galaxy was indeed at a redshift of 14.32, shattering the previous most-distant galaxy record
Over the last two years, scientists have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (also called Webb or JWST) to explore what astronomers refer to as Cosmic Dawn – the period in the first few hundred million years after the big bang where the first galaxies were born. These galaxies provide vital insight into the ways in which the gas, stars, and black holes were changing when the universe was very young. In October 2023 and January 2024, an international team of astronomers used Webb to observe galaxies as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) program. Using Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph), they obtained a spectrum of a record-breaking galaxy observed only two hundred and ninety million years after the big bang. This corresponds to a redshift of about 14, which is a measure of how much a galaxy’s light is stretched by the expansion of the universe
According to the European scientists, “Euclid peered deep into this nursery using its infrared camera, exposing hidden regions of star formation for the first time, mapping its complex filaments of gas and dust in unprecedented detail, and uncovering newly formed stars and planets. Euclid’s instruments can detect objects just a few times the mass of Jupiter, and its infrared ‘eyes’ reveal over 300,000 new objects in this field of view alone.”
I mean, it’s pretty common sense that at some point inertia would be overpowered by the gravitational pull of the black hole. Pretty sure that’s what would happen if the moon got a little too close to us, too.
Of course there’s a point where something cannot escape the gravity. What this article states is that instead of continuing to orbit while perpetually getting closer to the singularity, once the plunging region is hit the light/matter/whatever drops in basically a straight line at the speed of light to the center.
I’ve seen this pop up a few times, but there are a couple big issues that pop up right out the gate.
Space is constantly expanding with no center. If we’re in a back hole, we and everything else in here are cruising toward the singularity. And if we’re in a black hole, we’re already passed the event horizon, the point at which gravity is so strong that even light can’t escape; and as we progress toward the singularity, that force becomes exponentially stronger… so light from one point inside the black hole would have very limited potential to cross paths with another point… so how is it light from stars is actually making it to us / for the few stars we’re actually in the line of fire for it’s light - if that’s even possible inside the event horizon - shouldn’t the night sky only have a narrow region of visible stars; and shouldn’t they appear distorted as s all hell?
It seems like you are making the assumption that time and the laws of physics follow the same rules inside the singularity. If we ourselves are inside a singularity, the net result was enough matter to create our known universe… but maybe in the next layer down matter behaves differently and stars can be produced on a smaller scale. Or maybe the matter is heading towards its own scale of big-bang. And what if time contracts to the point that the life of the black hole, and its relative size, corresponds to the life of that universe and its expansion?
A story which comes to mind and presents an interesting theory that could apply here can be found in He Who Shrank.
We’d be somewhere between the event horizon and the singularity - once we’ve made it to the singularity we’d just be crushed into it to join the infinitely dense speck of matter.
Between the event horizon and singularity we can still exist as a unique object/entity, we just can’t move any matter/energy from the inside out.
But once we reach the singularity, we just become more mass in the singularity. No more me, or you, or Earth, etc: just singularity.
The time it takes to move from event horizon to singularity would scale with the size of the black hole, so I guess if the singularity had enough mass to generate an event horizon the size of what we understand to be the universe, then yeah the trillions of years it would take for things like Earth to form, life to develop, etc could all happen as we move closer to the singularity, but we run into the snags like the ones I mentioned in my first post - the observable universe would all be on a crash course toward the same point, and not uniformly moving away from everything as space expands; and the further out we look into space, the more distorted it would become: distant galaxies wouldn’t appear as neat discs, but as stretched lines. We could even use that distortion to infer the approximate location of the singularity and gauge how much time is left before we’re smashed into it.
But you’re still judging all of this based on our current laws of physics, or that anyone even knows for certain what is occurring within a black hole. Also remember that time loses all conventional meaning once you pass the event horizon. Now compare that to what we think we know of our own big-bang… that we believe all matter started as a singularity, and that in the initial expansion both time and the very laws of physics were quite muddy and took a bit to settle into what we know today. Within the black hole we don’t even know if the concept of matter still has the same meaning – what appears as a known value of X suns to us could resolve to a whole universe if the physics change.
I’m curious why you think the matter coming it to a black hole would be observed are rushing towards the singularity? We’ve already seen just how insanely that much gravity distorts the perceptions around the outside of a black hole, so why wouldn’t the same be true on the inside? Our own universe has a finite amount of matter, and yet the space it is ‘contained’ in wraps around on itself so there is no center. The boundary of a black hole could potentially create the same result – a threshold that we could never cross, but also a wrapping of the space within back onto itself. Also consider the unknown nature of time, what if all the matter that will ever be consumed by the black hole feeds into that singularity while simultaneously exploding into the life of a new universe? In a place where time doesn’t exist, all of time would happen simultaneously, so from another viewpoint the billions of years (not trillions) that comprise the history of the life and death of our universe could happen all at once. We know that as we look back towards the time of our own singularity the math surrounding time and space break down to a point where they no longer have any meaning. The same is true for what happens inside a black hole, it all breaks down and become meaningless under our current math. Until we know more about what is happening, or find some way to peer back before the big bang, you really can’t discount the idea that what happens inside a black hole could be similar to the creation of a new universe. What appears to us as stringification could be the result of the math showing us the entire history of a moving object instead of a single point in time. Hell we don’t even know if time works the same way, maybe once you cross the event horizon time starts moving backwards and what we see as everything moving towards a singularity appears in there as a universe expanding away from it.
Yes all of this sounds like fantastical sci-fi stuff. Then again, what we know about the birth of our universe and how space and time are warped within a black hole also sounds like fantastical sci-fi stuff, and until we have a better grasp on the nature of all of it, there’s nothing yet that proves or disproves if a whole universe could exist inside a black hole.
I mean, yes I’m assuming they follow the laws of physics. To my knowledge everything about them that we actually can observe does actually follow the laws of physics (including things like time dilation), and we can use what we do know to form a pretty solid hypothesis about what we don’t.
I mean, I could argue that they’re actually c’thulu eggs, and you can’t prove me wrong because we can’t look inside! …but there’s also no evidence to support that. Drawing conclusions about reality based on science fiction is silly. We ofc don’t know everything about the universe, but we should stick with what real evidence actually supports.
Yeah I agree that we shouldn’t try to contradict the evidence we have without a good hypothesis to back it up, I just feel like we’re still at a stage where the mathematics give us an idea of what might be possible, but that is seriously constrained by our limited understanding of what happens at these grand scales. Without letting your mind wander to the possibilities of what could be, we would never take the time to look beyond what we know. I’m just trying to say that our knowledge of the subject is still greatly limited, and this idea can’t be ruled out completely until we know more. In the meantime, what if someone did seriously explore the notion? Perhaps they’ll find proof that shows it can’t be possible, but perhaps they might also stumble upon a idea even more fantastic.
Yeah I agree that we shouldn’t try to contradict the evidence we have without a good hypothesis to back it up
That’s what I’m saying though - the hypothesis that we exist in a black hole does contradict the evidence currently available. Or at least I think it does - I opened the contractions initially as a question because this isn’t my area of expertise. I’ve had a few relevant classes, and have a casual interest in the topic, so I think I have a pretty solid foundation at least; but ultimately I’m just a medic, so I was kinda hoping someone with a more dedicated background would chime in.
There’s a LOT of BS surrounding the topic of black holes - and understandably so. They’re intriguing as hell, so it’s no wonder that they’re so often the object of artistic freedom. But all’s fine and well to proclaim that they’re some kind of portal, or mini universe, or cleverly disguised alien spacecraft, or even a sentient creature… in the context of science fiction. But to say any of those about black holes IRL should come with supporting evidence, especially if some aspect of the proposal clashes with our current interpretation of what we can either directly observe or indirectly postulate.
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