our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, is moving toward us at a speed of about 100 kilometers per second.
Uhhhhhh
Yeah that’s not even fast given the distances involved. About 450 million years away if I’m not screwing up the numbers.
Headline is waaaay too overstated. A computer simulation model showed that an arrangement of dark matter as described would create an output that matches some of the things we observe in reality. But that’s SUPER far from scientists declaring that this is how the galaxy actually is.
It’s so overstated, the existence of dark matter hasn’t even been proven yet.
i know. they all do it more/less. that article has a few links. also have another board with lower standards. mostly just me for picture articles; https://midwest.social/c/science . my eyes are getting bad for reading/typing. 62
The more i learn the more i realise most of science is this way.
I was already adult when i realised “the big bang theory” is exactly what it implies. A possible theory and not at all a fact.
That’s not the case, it’s not a division between “facts and speculation” and that’s a very simplified and franky poor way to view scientific models.
We can demonstrate with many different tools and areas of evidence that our universe is expanding as time progresses. Reverse that and at some point everything was close together. That’s IT. That’s the ENTIRE big-bang model, it just means the whole universe was once hot and dense, and then it wasn’t anymore because everything moved apart, and we’ve seen nothing that contradicts this.
There are many particulars that we haven’t figured out, but if the fact that everything was once close together isn’t accurate, then we don’t have science at all, it would mean we don’t actually have tools and methods for creating models. And since we’re here using tools and models in application to type words on a screen to each other, I don’t think that’s the case.
Please take care with the sensational headlines like “MOST DISTANT OBJECT EVER SEEN BREAKS ALL SCIENCE” and that bullshit, it’s very hyped up and not at all what it sounds like. We don’t know what forces of nature did in that early, hot, dense universe and we don’t know all the forces at work today in the expanding universe, that doesn’t mean it’s “just a theory” and that’s not even what the term “theory” means.
As i have said elsewhere, i regret mixing up the terminology, which frankly i am quite embarrassed about.
I am not refuting the knowledge that the universe expands. I was speaking on the common anecdote that “in the beginning there was nothing and then it exploded and thats how the universe began” which is how it was initially explained to me and what the majority of people seem to understand and take for absolute truth.
It’s ok, I attack these misconceptions as much for readers and browsers as to clear up anything for the commenters. I don’t mean to sound heavy, but too many people leverage common misconceptions into full-on anti-science conspirism.
“in the beginning there was nothing and then it exploded and thats how the universe began”
The people who explain it like this need a good slappin’, it’s not at all accurate. In fact, it’s the opposite of what happened (as far as we know.)
what do you get when you compress an infinite universe? An infinite universe of compressed energy and matter.
The universe was in it’s early state, as far as we can surmise, infinite in density and mass, but it wasn’t “small” and we have no way to know what came before this state. But the short of it is, everything came into being from a state where everything was super dense and hot, then the space itself got bigger so the hot stuff started moving apart from each other. There was never “nothing” as far as we can tell.
You’re confusing scientific theory with scientific hypothesis.
A hypothesis is an educated guess that doesn’t have facts backing it yet.
A theory is a hypothesis that has undergone rigorous testing and has strong, repeatable evidence backing it.
So Dark Matter is a hypothesis?
I believe a lot of the confusion results from forming conclusions based on what is presented in headlines, both in media and journals, instead of reading the usually much more modest full text.
Shitty attention economy at work. Brain rot started a loooong time ago.
I thought that was a Law?
A law or principal is a single proven statement while a theory is a collection of proven statements.
Basically, a law is how things work while a theory is why things work.
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I think it’s that Laws are proven to be true whereas Theories just have not yet been proven false.
Not quite. Laws are a single proven statement and theories are a collection of laws used to explain why something is the way it is.
The Big Bang Theory uses the laws of physics to justify it.
… that’s not how it works, though. In science, a theory is a proven hypothesis that can be used to make predictions and successfully does so. Just because we don’t know what happened in the very first fraction of an instant doesn’t mean the theory (that the universe was in a very hot, compact and dense state that rapidly expanded out and formed the universe as we know it today) isn’t correct, just that it’s incomplete.
I did mix up the terminology and i have no excuse except real life exhaustion.
But does an incomplete theory and unproven facts not kinda be the same thing? People believe “first, there was nothing, then it exploded” but the truth is we don’t know that.
Then there is also all the stuff JW telescope discovered about the early universe that we didn’t expect, showing how imperfect our knowledge is.
That’s not the case- an incomplete theory breaks down at some point, but it still has explanatory power. BBT has a lot of evidence, and we’ve made a lot of predictions using it that have been proven. Of course, you’re still correct in saying that JWST has shown numerous discrepancies, but that shows that it can be superseded by a better theory- an analogy would be Maxwell’s equations are good for most situations, but QED is the more complete theory that works even when Maxwell’s equations don’t.
I feel better knowing this guy is looking over our galaxy
Great dark buffalo
Sounds like a Native American spirit animal.
Looks like a bat
The fact that 95% of the universe’s mass-energy content is fucking invisible kinda freaks me out.
Don’t worry, it might not be what we think and it could just be evidence of higher planes of reality or something deeply more complicated about time itself that we can’t understand.
Doesn’t that make you feel better??
It’s a stand-in for the lack of a better understanding currently. No one has detected dark matter in our solar system yet. It’s all just deviations from how huge amounts of matter should behave according to our formulas. Yes, Dark Matter is well established; because it’s convenient. But assuming some invisible existence to explain a lack of understanding is not science, that’s a religion.
I like to imagine there’s a group of dark matter physicists out there trying to explain why their models of the universe are 5% off, and coming up with the notion of photons and the theory of photo-energetic matter. We’re the oddballs in this neighborhood.
It’s a freaky thing to consider if you believe in some divine nature like the soul, or if you believe that you’re a conscious agent independent of your environment. With these beliefs, you position yourself as an “observer” of the universe… such a position costs you observability of the contextual processes which led to your being.
What if, instead, you’re a giant mount of cells that evolved to interact with your environment? What if your self is more of a relationship with nature than it is a static identity? From this angle, we should expect that we’re fighting an uphill battle when we want to learn about the nature of being in this universe. Most likely, we can not perceive of things which we had no necessity to perceive at any point in our ancestral lineage.
Dark matter is spooky, but only because we are beings of spookiness. We decide what is spooky and project that experience into the empirical reality of our dwelling.
I am but a ceramic bead in the intergalactic weighted blanket floating through the cosmos.
‘god’ is dark matter
People once said the moon was made of mud and birds went there in winter to hibernate in the mud.
Before we understood lightning, we had a whole pantheon of “Gods” to explain it.
50 years ago, we we didn’t know if bigfoot or giant squid existed, today we have enough tools that we learned that one exists, and the other probably doesn’t.
We can demonstrate in a laboratory that cause and effect are not solid concepts, so any “god” in our universe would need to be something that doesn’t exist within causality or he’s not “all powerful” at all, and if you have a being that interacts with us, but already knows how everything will evolve and change through time, what’s even the fucking point of a god at all? If I’m going to believe in magic, it needs to explain something or be useful in some way.
anything we don’t understand yet, that can be god… it used to be thunder, earthquakes, now it’s vast sheets of lifeless matter flooping around our intergalactic neighbourhood - progress I guess? 😁
lifeless as far as we can tell. Who knows what complexities arise in the dark places of the universe?
well yes exactly … in that realm of the unknown, our imaginations can run riot
it wasn’t that long ago that there were still dark corners of the earth - well, more like vast tracts of unexplored terrain - in the Amazon, deep in mountain ranges, or in icy tundra.
There dragons did roam, whilst flying demons did dart overhead, their ungodly shrieks turning the hearts of the bravest men to jello.
There are no secrets on the earth any more, so we have to look elsewhere to satisfy our lust for meaning and importance.
on larger scales we are basically atom size. spec of dirt on a giant flea on a dog. i should get some sleep. wired
Am I god too?
I am my own damn god.
Does this mean something like the end of Death’s End, the last book in The Three Body Problem trilogy?
liking the ‘mom’s butt on the copier’ theory
Various projections of the posterior mean density of the constrained simulation ensemble, normalized by the cosmic mean density. Credit: Nature Astronomy (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-025-02770-w. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-025-02770-w
You leave my mom out of this, and where did you get photos of her posterior?
she sat on the copier. milkyway has a supermassive black hole. 🤣 🤣
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