The Universe Has 20 Times More Galaxies Than We Thought (gizmodo.com) 258
A new study by a team of international astronomers has produced some astounding results: they concluded that the universe contains at least two trillion galaxies -- as much as 20 times more than previously thought. The study adds that 90 percent of all galaxies are hidden from us. This hidden portion can't be seen even with our most powerful telescopes. Gizmodo adds: Consequently, this means we also have to update the number of stars in the observable universe, which now numbers around 700 sextillion (that's a 7 with 23 zeros behind it, or 700 thousand billion billion). And that's just within the observable universe. Because the cosmos emerged some 13.8 billion years ago, we're only able to observe objects up to a certain distance from Earth. Anything outside this "Hubble Bubble" is invisible to us because the light from these distant objects simply haven't had enough time to reach us. It's difficult -- if not impossible -- to know how many galaxies reside outside this cosmological blind spot.
No. (Score:3, Funny)
The Universe Has 20 Times More Galaxies Than We Thought
20 times more than YOU thought, perhaps, but not me. I hadn't thought.
Does this change then the need for dark matter? (Score:3, Interesting)
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No, and the summary gets it wrong, too. In the early universe the galaxies were smaller, so there were more of them. The number of stars and the mass of dark matter hasn't changed.
Re:Does this change then the need for dark matter? (Score:5, Informative)
as far as I can tell it doesn't matter - dark matter is invoked to explain why individual galaxies don't fall apart, because the mass we can see doesn't seem to be enough to keep it together at the rate they spin; having more galaxies doesn't change that.
(I find it amusing that dark matter is handwaving why big things don't fly apart and dark energy is handwaving why bigger things do :) But I'm weird :)
Re:Does this change then the need for dark matter? (Score:5, Informative)
(I find it amusing that dark matter is handwaving why big things don't fly apart and dark energy is handwaving why bigger things do :) But I'm weird :)
Galactic rotation curves was just the first bit of observational evidence that we saw over 80 years ago. Since then, every other explaination has been shown not to be the case. Since then, there have been many other observed evidence such as gravitational lensing, fluctuations in the CBR, etc. which is all under Observational Evidence under the Dark Matter Wikipedia page. All have been pointing more and more towards matter than only interacts via gravity, while all other competing theories fail to explain other observations. Furthermore, it tends to be called dark matter, and dark energy, energy, because they end up with unknowns that have specific units, and when those units are those of mass or energy, they get called mass and energy.
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Ah, cool. I was pretty sure that they had other reasons besides galactic spin by now, but I didn't realize that the units worked out that way. Thanks!
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No, we still need dark matter or a lot of our physics theory is bunk. The bunk bit needs to be avoided.
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Dear sweet Mitra, there's still idiots who bring up the electric universe theory? HAHAHHAHHAHHHAHHHHA AHAH AHHA AHHA HA AHAHAHA HAH HA. No, i'm not laughing WITH you.
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The electric universe theory, while more a fringe acid trip than an actual theory, occasionally rears it's misguided head-in-the-sand self from the few people stuck in the 1990's who think their genius was overlooked by all, and if only academia would ignore those other "loser" guys like Einstein, Hubble, well hell, basically ANY actual astronomer or physicist, then they'd rightly get their due.
These guys sum it up pretty well:
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If your theory, when tested, does not show evidence for what your theory says MUST be there... you're theory is fucked up. If that same theory says 5 or 10 things CANNOT happen if the theory is correct, and all of those things are ACTUALLY OBSERVED TO HAPPEN..... you're theory is fucked up. If both of those happen, you're theory is FUCKING WRONG, and anyone who still ascribes to it is no longer dealing with science, they're dealing with DOGMA.
Obfuscating and trying to sh
Where? (Score:2)
Drake Equation.... (Score:4, Insightful)
So, how does this affect the Drake Equation? Even if we assume a very, very low percentage of extraterrestrial life and even a lower percentage of *intelligent* extraterrestrial life, we're still looking at "billions and billions" (sorry Carl) of potential intelligent species out there, we just can't seem to contact them though due to the vast distances involved.
Too bad really. Until we can come up with some way of cheating physics, we are stuck in this solar system for the foreseeable future.
Re:Drake Equation.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Short answer is, it multiplies the number by 20. Drake equation is just a string of multipliers. One of them reflects the total number of worlds. 20x more galaxies is 20x more worlds. (Assuming the extra 19 galaxies are of equivalent size.)
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"Assuming the extra 19 galaxies are of equivalent size." They're not, at least not equivalent to the one. Apparently the astronomers think the large nearby galaxies we see near us are the result of mergers of much smaller ones over time. In other words, the old galaxies--those 19--are much smaller (perhaps 1/20th, IIUC).
Re:Drake Equation.... (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't. The Drake equation only applies to the Milky Way. If you want to expand the Drake equation to the entirety of the universe, you take whatever number you get from the Drake equation, and multiply by the number of galaxies in the universe, which keeps being revised upwards with more detection. So at minimum, you are looking at whatever your Drake equation is times a hundred billion.
Wait (Score:3)
Does this imply that the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light? Wouldn't that be a contradiction of the speed of light being the fastest speed you can travel at? Can someone who read the article shed some light on this? :)
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Re:Wait (Score:4, Interesting)
Well....let's change that to something that is physically possible.
If you were travelling 99.99% the speed of light in one direction, and something else, say 1 light year away, was travelling in the opposite direction at 99.99% the speed of light. From YOUR perspective in the first ship, the light from the other ship would take....wait for it.....1 year.
Spacetime stretches and squishes based on your speed. That's WHY time dilation occurs.
Re:Wait (Score:5, Informative)
The speed of light limits how fast you can travel through space. The expansion of the universe is due to space itself expanding, and there is no limit (as far as we know) to how fast this can happen.
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The "inflationary period" theory does indicate that space expanded at rates faster than light would be able to travel (for a while - the description I read of the theory [wikipedia.org] says it was done by 10^-32 seconds after the big bang and that in that time the universe expanded by 10^26 or more), but it seems that since it was space expanding and not matter moving through space, it's not considered a contradiction - like saying that a boat with a top speed of 10 knots relative to the water could be carried by a fast c
The Universe is a TARDIS (Score:2)
It's bigger than it looks.
The current scientific view is that the big bang exploded the universe out far faster than the speed of light. They think it got to the size we see within a trillionth of a second.
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But you will probably need someone smarter than me to explain it to you...
Ill give it a try but I might be quite wrong: During inflation, even though the universe was expanding faster than the speed of light, no information was traveling faster than light, no causal effects traveling faster than light, and no laws broken.
Now I'll just wait for a real scientist to
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The expansion of the universe doesn't involve anything travelling - it happens via the addition of more space in between all the objects. Everything ends up further away from everything else, but nothing actually moved through space. The amount of new distance that gets added then depends on how much distance is already there, so if you consider something far enough away, the amount of new distance appearing between you and it is more than light can travel across in the same time period (so any light trying
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That's the fastest that a mass-less particle can travel through space, not how fast the universe itself can expand.
We don't even know what the medium is outside of the universe (if there even is anything) and even then, our speed of light "speed limit" might not apply there.
Rush (Score:2)
Even if we could travel at the speed of light, we probably couldn't even catch/contact many of those near the edge of detection, yet still visible.
Due to accelerating expansion, they would be moving too fast to catch by the time we got close.
Thus, they are effectively shut off from us such that we perhaps should consider them just shadows of the past, fossils, rather than tangible things. If they launch ET or messages from ET, they better do it soon, or should have already done it, if they want us to see.
No
Read The Fine Paper (Score:5, Informative)
So I had to click around awhile, but here's the actual paper:
http://www.spacetelescope.org/... [spacetelescope.org]
For some of us, it makes a huge difference if we're reading the actual paper, or trying to understand the watered-down version on a click-bait site.
Total Perspective Vortex (Score:2)
Every time I read news like this I feel like I've just entered the Total Perspective Vortex http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/w... [wikia.com]. For those that don't know (shame!), this invention, originally created by Trin Tragula as a way to get back at his wife (who was always telling him to get a "sense of proportion"), is now used as a torture and (in effect) killing device on the planet Frogstar B. The prospective victim of the TPV is placed within a small chamber wherein is displayed a model of the entire universe - t
Does this effect the concept of Dark Energy (Score:3)
If there is much more mass beyond the observable universe won't that help explain why the observable universe is expanding faster than it should (based on the mass of the observable universe)?
To clarify (Score:2)
To clarify, because the summary makes a mess of it, the twenty times more galaxies they are talking about are within the observable universe.
The stuff about galaxies we can never see because they're outside the OU was just a bit of colour at the end of the article.
Just foolin' (Score:2)
Darn. (Score:2)
The Universe Has 20 Times More Galaxies Than We Thought
Just when I finished my bucket list.
Okay - does that mean we don't need dark matter? (Score:2)
Stars in the observable universe (Score:2)
"Consequently, this means we also have to update the number of stars in the observable universe"
If these stars are not observable, why do we have to update the number of observable stars?
Confused... (Score:2)
Then why the tell did Samsung just issue a profit warning?
Light hasn't reached us (Score:2)
"Because the cosmos emerged some 13.8 billion years ago, we're only able to observe objects up to a certain distance from Earth. Anything outside this "Hubble Bubble" is invisible to us because the light from these distant objects simply haven't had enough time to reach us."
The light has been traveling for 13.8 billion years and it still hasn't reached us. That is amazing.
Dark matter down? (Score:2)
So, if the Universe has 20 times as many galaxies, and so, presumably, 20 times as much normal matter, then the estimate that the Universe is only 4% normal matter jumps to 80% normal matter, and a *lot* less dark matter, right?
Re:So how does this affect the Drake Equation? (Score:5, Informative)
It's very probable. But since we also know that the Periodic Table of Elements is universal, as well as the fundamental forces, we also know things like warp drive are just not feasible...
So they are over there, and we are here. End of story.
Drake Equation == 1 (Score:4, Insightful)
Yet. Three hundred years ago, most of the mundane tech we use on a daily basis would have been considered to be impossible. FTL travel might be impossible via acceleration, but there are many ways to skin a cat. I think that if we don't accidental wipe ourselves out, we will eventually work out some way to travel between stars.
And there is alien life out there. The trick is just finding it.
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How do you get from a velocity of "a bit" to a velocity of "a fucking fucking bastard fucking lot" without accelerating?
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Easy: you bring the place you are and the place want to go closer to each other.
Yes, that's serious.
Re:Drake Equation == 1 (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you get from a velocity of "a bit" to a velocity of "a fucking fucking bastard fucking lot" without accelerating?
Understand I do not believe the following to be true, but they are answers that fit...
1} We discover that the universe is a simulation and learn how to edit parts of it, like X/Y/Z coordinates.
2} We discover unforeseen properties of the universe below our current observable/theorized smallest qualities that allow bypassing conventional transit.
3} We discover access to what is best described as "parallel universes" and can step from one to another, selecting specific parameters as differences between them, such as "my location".
Again, I don't buy any of those as likely. And #2 is nebulous at best. But the point the OP was making is that our understanding of the universe is not yet complete and given a long period of time, the discoveries yet to be made may be very, very startling to someone of our time period. Things we currently think impossible may be possible, just because our understanding of possible is incomplete. This mindset isn't science-fiction... it's just being humble. Speculating precisely what discoveries will be made and how they will work... that's fiction. But believing that we don't have an exhaustive understanding of physics is just sensible.
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I like point 1, it gets people with waaaay too much money all excited and they start spending it on proving that 1 is true.
I happen to have a method for proving 1. It only requires a few morons to fund me.
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Indeed, and not only that, but trying to find a way to "break out" of the simulation. That seems optimistic. Imagine if Super Mario discovered he was in a game and tried to break out into our world, I doubt he'd have much luck.
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It worked on Babylon 5, last episode of season 4, "Deconstruction of Fall[ing|en] Stars" (can't remember the exact title). The simulated Garibaldi, aware that he was a simulation, hacked into the computer he was running on and controlled a thing or two.
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The Alcubierre drive requires something of negative mass, which may well be impossible, or there may be other impossibilities involved. If it works as an FTL drive, it's also a time machine according to Special Relativity, and we get even more weird things to think about.
Re: Drake Equation == 1 (Score:2)
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How do you get from a velocity of "a bit" to a velocity of "a fucking fucking bastard fucking lot" without accelerating?
Well, as velocity is the change of location according to time, not speed which is affected by acceleration, what people are usually saying is that they get from point A to point B in a time faster than light can through a vacuum through Minkowski space (flat space). If you are talking about raw speed, it could be that particles could be created going faster than the speed of light, therefore never need to accelerate. Those would be tachyons and the only real serious talk about them was in a Michael Kaku boo
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OK, you got me.
s/accelerating/accelerating or using magic/
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OK, you got me.
s/accelerating/accelerating or using magic/
Any technology advanced enough will look like fucking hocus pocus to the (relative) primitive observer.
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Wormholes are shortcuts, not FTL travel, if they exist and we can safely transit them.
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there are many ways to skin a cat.
While that may be true in the literal sense (one could use a knife, or a vegetable peeler, or a melon baller, etc) in the general sense, I'm reasonably certain there is only one (removal of the epidermis from the underlying muscle, bone, etc).
<insert "The More You Know" star here>
Re:So how does this affect the Drake Equation? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's very probable. But since we also know that the Periodic Table of Elements is universal, as well as the fundamental forces, we also know things like warp drive are just not feasible...
So they are over there, and we are here. End of story.
Not end of story. In fact, we have no idea how the story ends, or even how long it is. The human notion of accepted physics has been constantly evolving and is still changing every year. For example, two hundred years ago we had virtually no understanding of electromagnetism, or that our theories of electricity and magnetism would be unified. I find it incredibly arrogant and shortsighted to believe that FTL travel via warp drive must be impossible simply because our current understanding of the universe (which we know to be incomplete) can't make it work.
We believe antimatter exists yet we are terrible at working with it. Hell, we still don't know anything about dark energy or dark matter, though we think they probably exist. We spend billions of dollars searching for predicted subatomic particles and find things we hadn't even imagined, and we are just beginning to get into quantum spookiness. It was not so many generations ago that terrestrial human flight sounded preposterous, so I'm a long way from accepting the conjecture that warp drive is not possible. It could be that we are multiple currently-unimaginable breakthroughs away from starting to understand how.
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It's very probable. But since we also know that the Periodic Table of Elements is universal, as well as the fundamental forces, we also know things like warp drive are just not feasible...
So they are over there, and we are here. End of story.
We know what animals are out there, you will never get better transportation than a horse. Making your own energy is just not feasible, even the technological wonder that is a boat are at the mercy of the wind and elements, far beyond man's control.
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It's very probable. But since we also know that the Periodic Table of Elements is universal, as well as the fundamental forces, we also know things like warp drive are just not feasible...
So they are over there, and we are here. End of story.
I like to hold out for the possibility that we don't yet know everything there is to know about physics. History is replete with examples of people doing things previously thought impossible.
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It's an anonymous coward post. It's not modded down, it just starts at 0 by default. I'd say that won't change until there's AI good enough to automatically tell intelligent posts from poor ones. Since humans don't even have that skill down yet, I'd say it could be a while.
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I mean, it's literally only 120 years since people were saying things like "heavier than air flight is impossible, we know the physics, we know the materials, it's just not feasible"
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I mean, it's literally only 120 years since people were saying things like "heavier than air flight is impossible, we know the physics, we know the materials, it's just not feasible"
Who the fuck ever said that? Are birds lighter than air?
You said "literally" so I expect a quote backing your bullshit up.
Re:So how does this affect the Drake Equation? (Score:4, Informative)
well, it's 121 years, but according to this article on Lord Kelvin [wolfram.com], he said something like that (not exact - but exactness was not specified). I'm inclined to give him the year.
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Thing is, Lord Kelvin was one man, and he said heavier-than-air flight was impractical, not impossible. What we've got is pretty much the entire field of physics saying that warp drives are impossible without something with negative mass.
Re:So how does this affect the Drake Equation? (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean, it's literally only 120 years since people were saying things like "heavier than air flight is impossible, we know the physics, we know the materials, it's just not feasible"
Who the fuck ever said that? Are birds lighter than air? You said "literally" so I expect a quote backing your bullshit up.
Lord Kelvin said some things along those lines within ten years of the Wright Brothers. He also said lots of other silly things on other topics like calling x-rays a "hoax". [zapatopi.net] This page cites sources and has links to scans and such.
"I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning or of the expectation of good results from any of the trials we hear of ... I would not care to be a member of the Aeronautical Society." [Source]
"The air-ship, on the plan of those built by Santos-Dumont, is a delusion and a snare. A gas balloon, paddled around by oars, is an old idea, and can never be of any practical use. Some day, no doubt, some one will invent a flying machine that one will be able to navigate without having to have a balloon attachment. But the day is a long way off when we shall see human beings soaring around like birds." [TLWT, vol. 2, p. 1168]
"They never will be able to use dirigible balloons as a means of conveying passengers from place to place. There never was and never can be any commercial value to any such affair. It is all a delusion and a snare. Santos-Dumont is a very bright young man, but an air ship as planned by him is not practicable." [Said to reporters after having arrived in New York on April 19, 1902. Quoted in the New York Times, p.2, the next day.]
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According to your quote, Lord Kevin specifically said that he believed airplanes would no doubt eventually be invented: "Some day, no doubt, some one will invent a flying machine that one will be able to navigate without having to have a balloon attachment. But the day is a long way off when we shall see human beings soaring around like birds."
That's the opposite position from what was asserted. The context here was a claim that scientists who believe warp drive is physically impossible and cannot be invent
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Ya, Lord Kelvin gets quoted a lot so I looked up that but took the time to actually hunt down what seem to be actual quotes with citations. Further more, he expresses that he thinks things might eventually be invented in one quote but not others. So, if I wanted to post unverified or singular quotes, I could have, but instead post the selection with link so people can read for themselves. I would bet that if I wanted to spend more time to do fact checking, that I could find similar evidence of notable peopl
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This doesn't mean that everyone who is skeptical is wrong. And it doesn't mean everyone with fantasies is right.
*YOU* have to prove your fantasies. Otherwise you are no different than a religious loon talking about the end of the world. You have the same faith.
Leaving oneself open to the unimagined possibilities is not the same as indulging in fantasies. There is a tendency in our culture to say that things we don't know about don't exist or are impossible. The real truth is that we simply don't know. I guess people are uncomfortable with uncertainty. But I think it is better to not foreclose the future based on our understanding of the present.
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Instead of saying "impossible according to the laws of physics as we understand them", isn't it reasonable just to say "impossible"? There's a big difference between saying that large colonies in the Asteroid belt are impossible and saying that time travel is impossible.
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Yeah, people have said cold fusion is impossible. If we wait long enough, anything is possible.
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And don't get me started on the Drake equation, which is utterly unprovable and reliant on blind assumptions. I hate how some people treat it as gospel while i
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We can't make FTL travel work today, even in the most basic theoretical sense, but I can't get on board with the idea that it can't possibly ever happen.
To paraphrase Fermi's Paradox, if FTL travel is possible, why haven't we seen any evidence of time travelling aliens?
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....when you start assuming that FTL exists, you start breaking physics.
Fixed that for you.
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The reletivity of wrong (Score:3)
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I wonder how many many millenia must pass for realistic posts like yours to not be modded at 0
The same amount that it will take to login to an account.
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The Drake equation is still bullshit, this doesn't change it.
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My point is not that we are necessarily alone, but that even in an infinite sample size, uniqueness is possible... the universe is unimaginably vast, but still finite. It seems it must be similarly possible, and not even necessarily improbable, that we might be alone as well. We cannot ascertain the actual odds of life existing because we don't know enou
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Bullshit.
The numbers are too damned big. It's strange enough that we either no not see or do not recognize signs of some vastly distant (and vastly in the past) society. They are TOO damned big. If we exist, then other societies in space exist. If you could wave a wand and KNOW whether or not any intelligent life exists in the universe besides us, and the answer was "no it does not", then it would be an argument for special creation by mathematical certainty.
It's too big. It's too old. If you accept a
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We now know that the building blocks of evolution and the conditions it required are not at all unique to Earth. That gives us good reason to suspect there's other life even in our own solar system, probably several places in it. Technological civilizations are much harder to predict the frequency of, but we be pretty sure there's life.
Re:So how does this affect the Drake Equation? (Score:5, Informative)
The Drake Equation just deals with our galaxy, so it doesn't have any effect.
I believe it was limited as such because it would be "more feasible" to have a meaningful conversation with a species in this galaxy thanks to the distances involved.
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The Drake Equation is just plain gibberish.
Re:So how does this affect the Drake Equation? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not gibberish. It was devised as a tool for promoting discussion. It's not and never was meant to used in earnest.
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My theory is that intelligent life is harder to detect than a galaxy, and it seems almost all galaxies have been undetected until now...
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How much more probable is Alien life now?
Practically guaranteed, but the possible places they might be just exploded exponentially.
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Re:Dark Matter Ratio (Score:4, Informative)
The presence of dark matter is inferred from the behavior of individual galaxies. The gravitational binding energy of galaxies should be much higher than what we can attribute to baryonic matter alone. So even though there are more galaxies than we thought, they still require dark matter to account for this discrepancy.
Basically, if we assume that 20x the number of galaxies means 20x the amount of baryonic matter (which not necessarily true, but whatever), then there must be 20x the amount of dark matter as well. So the ratio of baryonic matter to dark matter would remain the same.
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No, it means there are 20x as many Space Women as before. I cannot wait for interstellar travel.
Re:Mind Blown... (Score:4, Informative)
That has blown my mind.
What about dark matter ? Does anyone know how that figures into this ?
It doesn't.
Dark matter is used to explain the rotation rates of galaxies (there isn't enough visible matter to account for those rates.)
This study says we have more galaxies than we thought, not more stars within them than we thought.
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It's criminals, it's rapists.
I'm going to build a wall to keep it out. And make Astronomers pay for it.
--
Donny Fartpants.
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It's kind of pointless to guess at what is outside of the observable universe. Saying that it is composed of marshmallow fluff is not really any more absurd as saying it is full of ordinary galaxies or it is pure vacuum.
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Well, the observable universe increases continually, and will do so either forever or for some great amount of time in the future. So we are forever shrinking the volume of potential marshmallow fluff, moment by moment!
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He'd only complain that his election to president of the Universe has been stolen by Hillary prancing around in devils' horns and a tail, Paul Ryan (as if he had the wit or the balls), and the New York Times. He's a monument to his own ego, sort of a geometrically expanding pile of reflexive referencing bullshit.
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Why didn't we see a few new stars, or a few billion new stars, appear last night?
You didn't look up?
The link below is a 'star nursery' in the Carina Nebula.
http://www.space.com/images/i/... [space.com]
Astronomers have catalogued many "star nurseries". It's a certainty that there are many, many more beyond our ability to detect if this study has things basically correct.
This shows and labels a newborn star in the Horsehead Nebula.
http://amazingspace.org/news/a... [amazingspace.org]
Just because you don't see bright flashes in the sky every night doesn't mean no stars are being born, they're just usually too incredibly-
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And did a billion new stars (or even one) appear in that star nursery last night? Did that newborn star in the Horsehead Nebula appear last night?
"They appeared at night, it just wasn't *last* night."
No, last night billions of stars were born in other places where we didn't happen to be looking at especially hard, or where it's so far away we can barely detect galaxies and so was buried in the noise here.
Concerning the lack of bright flashes in the sky, if 700 sextillion *observable* stars are in the night sky, then, on average, a billion new *observable* stars have appeared every night over the course of 14 billion years.
You're taking the "observable" part of "observable universe" too literally. Just because some event occurs within the current boundaries of what's referred to as the "observable universe" does not mean it is even detectable, easily or otherwise. We a
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It is not a dogma, it is the most likely answer compatible with the law of physics as we know them.
How they got to this number is actually fascinating. How we combined methods to get further and further measurements, which, given the speed of light, allow us to tell the age of what we are seeing. How we observed the movement of things and derived equations which allowed us to go back in time and find the singularity which corresponds to the beginning of the universe. How we backed our research using indepen
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How they got to this number is actually fascinating.
The amount of data you can obfuscate by the innocent displacement of a decimal point is fascinating.
Assuming of course the speed of light proves a constant and not a variable across the galaxy.
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History has taught us that the if it can be dreamed of then it can be made possible. We will find a way to travel extremely long distances in space.
Untrue. I can dream of a time machine that lets me go back and kill Hitler's grandmother. That doesn't mean it's possible.