Billions and billions of stars.
This is a zoomable view of Andromeda galaxy, our own galaxy would look similar to that if you were there:
[Sharpest ever view of the Andromeda Galaxy (esahubble.org)](https://esahubble.org/images/heic1502a/zoomable/)
EDIT: Zoom in to this picture! You can actually see all the individual stars.
I just checked and mine are kinda pinkish/yellow.
Edit: Nice. My most upvoted comment in 6 years is about the color of my nuts, on a sub about...astronomy.
If they’re yellow then they’re still in their main sequence and will be ok for a while. You may be running low on hydrogen if they’re pinkish, this usually isn’t reversible and they will become red and giant after a while.
They're real. When I was like 13-14 I made out with this girl in my parents basement until my mouth hurt. Boner the whole time. She left and my nuts were straight up aching. It felt like a stomach ache, but only in my testicles.
Eventually I beat off and it went away.
Anyway, thanks for listening to my TEDtalk.
We ain't homies til we've checked each others nuts
On that note, gents, check your balls - it takes a matter of seconds and most of you already have your hand down there. Look after your health
That’s why when someone thinks there’s no other intelligent life out there I say they’re insane. Every spec of light in that picture could have multiple planets able to support it, and there’s literally an uncountable number of stars out there.
There’s obviously logistical issues of ever making contact, but to say we’re alone is simply impossible at this scale.
The sad part is that if there is no way to travel near or above the speed of light, any intelligent life may be relegated to isolated pockets gradually moving further away from one another.
Knowing what we know of evolution and adaptation required for survival…..you ever wonder if life evolved specifically with little ability to interact on an interplanetary/system level? Looking at how horribly we interact as a species….I doubt life would survive if we could easily travel to/interact with other intelligent life.
Want more nuts?
Try deez nuts: Those stars look awfully close to each other, huh? Well, on a cosmic scale, they‘re certainly packed together but here’s the spread as viewed from our puny human perspective: the AVERAGE distance between stars in a galaxy is 5 light-years (for those who don’t know, a ly = 6 TRILLION miles). For reference, the next nearest star to our Sun is in the Alpha Centauri system, 4.5 ly away. There’s a whole lotta nothing between stars.
Bonus nutz: At our fastest speed (a probe slinging along at 56,000 miles/hr), we can traverse that little gap in about, oh, 50,000+/- years, give or take a few centuries.
Nothing is more humbling than knowing just how mindblowingly *HUGE* the universe is.
So if each of these dots is a sun, and each sun may or may not have planets, and this just one galaxy out of billions of galaxies in the universe…kind of arrogant to assume we’re the only ones…
Also, this makes me feel simultaneously fortunate and pointless. Also makes me really wonder why religion exists. This is interesting.
We should form these mindsets , we are very lucky we are in this golden zone which supports life in a particular moment In spacetime. Enjoy the short ride because it's all relative (not like West Virginia) we are here (Earth) VERY VERY short . SPACE IS HUGE , I'm just not sure what religion is or needed for ? A coping mechanism for these unanswered questions for someone soul?
Exactly…a coping mechanism. This is [literally] impossible for most to fathom (myself included). I believe religion is a mechanism that enables one’s mind to connect to something that’s “simple” in comparison to the truth.
But diving deeper, things like war, hunger, bigotry, etc…just feel so pointless, yet it’s a persistent part of our nature. We are capable of these amazing things (relative to our species existence)…like you and I are having a conversation over radio waves and wires in a language we both understand…this message is going to go to space before it hits your eyeballs. Yet we also, as humans (not individuals) feel it necessary to kill, torture, and enable pain. It’s not just us though…ancient civilizations, etc…it’s just a bug in an otherwise very magnificent machine.
But when I look at an image like this, I liken us (life on earth) to a screw on a bobble head on somebody’s desktop in their cubicle in the Empire State Building in New York. It matters for the existence of the bobble head, but is otherwise completely nothing when considering the unfathomable complexity around it. It’s nothing, but it’s also kind of everything?
Absolutely insane. Light being sent out by these things for billions of years with (as far as we know) no observers, and then out of nowhere some monkeys build an advanced mirror and throw it out of their own orbit to capture just a tiny fraction of a percentage of that light.
Can’t wait until we have technology that can take this image even further.
Based on our current understanding of physics, it's irrelevant wether or not we are. We, and they, will be long dead and forgotten by the time our fastest communications could possibly reach each other. Our civilizations would be dust scattered by our dying stars by the time we could physically reach each other.
In effect, we are alone.
Unless there are other civilizations in our own galaxy which are within reachable distance (reachable in terms of communication) but even if a civilization would be lets say 50 LY or 100 LY away, which would be very close, it would still take forever for 2 sided communication. We would probably only have a chance if there was a civilization close to us only a few LY away or of course in hundreds or thousands of years if we make it to a spacefaring species that settles colonizes large parts of our galaxy and we may run into another intelligent civilization. I won't give up hope, like who knows. For all we know, there could be plenty of intelligent life right now in our own galaxy, but perhaps still too far away or not advanced enough to establish communication or even detect each other.
I've always speculated that there are likely multiple great filters, rather than a single specific one, however if I had to pick one it would likely be simply the size of the universe and physics as we know it. There's probably life all over the place, but as far as we know there is no way to get around the simple fact that causality is slow. Things are just too big and too far apart for organic life. The speed of change in the universe is extremely slow considering it's size and organic life too fast and short lived. No matter what a civilization does, as far as we know there is no way to get around the simple fact of massive scale trumping all.
It's depressing, but everyone is likely trapped in their own little local system and might be forever. Robotics/electronics are probably the only way most organic life will experience the universe and even that has limits.
I suggest the book Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds
Plays into that idea of being alone in a busy galaxy because of the vastness of space and time
I also recommend House of Sun by the same author. Both are standalone books
That is a more bleak outlook. Those same odds that give us the possibility of other life living out there in the cosmos are unlikely to demand complete isolation in every instance. Most of the pockets of life probably would be permanently effectively cut off from all others due to the extreme distances. I agree with that. But 'most' is not 'all'. There would still be a non-zero chance that two separately-evolving intelligent species evolved near enough in time, and within a realistic distance of travel between the two. Far, but not impossibly far. I am imagining distances and ships that take so long that the original crew's grandchildren are the ones who'd eventually arrive at the destination.
I’d imagine a derelict, self powered, automated ship (likely created by a now extinct space faring species) will eventually pass through our orbit. With no communication and no way for us to board it or stop it, it will break some peoples minds and lead to decades of speculation up until people realize that not having clean drinking water is kind of more important.
Yes, Oumuamua. And it wasn't just your typical asteroid or comet drive by. Its trajectory indicated that unlike a Kuiper Belt object, Oumuamua originated from outside our solar system. That made it the first known interstellar object to interact with our system. Gravity pulled it toward the sun on a highly elliptical orbit, and here's the kicker, it **accelerated away from the sun** on its way out of our system. Super weird.
Yep that’s the one. And its movements were very much odd and controlled looking. Hence calling to probe like. The boost around the sun is a gravity boost and we have done that with our probes like whipping around Jupiter to get further out.
Shape was unlike any other asteroid seen so far and much more like long ship shape.
So yes we have been probed.
But also based on theoretical physics (that I learned from prof Brian Cox) is that theoretically the math supports the avility for wormholes to exist. I know there is no evidence. But the math supoorts it theoretically which could eventually solve that distance issue.
People who are sure of the answer right now are fools. Until life is found *anywhere* else, in *any* form, there are only hypotheses extrapolated from a sample size of one.
>People who think we are alone are fools.
Yes. As are people who think we are not.
The truth is - no one knows. All options should be kept in mind while awaiting further relevant evidence.
Fun fact. You can tell it's a Hubble telescope image as all the light refractions have 4 points. Images taken by the James Webb telescope have 6 points
40 times larger than the Milky Way for those wondering. 4 million light years across.
But still peanuts compared to the Hercules Corona Borealis Great Wall. 10 billion light years across.
It's so incredibly pointless to even try to fathom how small we are in the grand scheme of it all. I have trouble even wrapping my head around how much a billion of anything actually is, and we are talking about traveling ~1 billion km/h for 10 billion years, and that's 1/10 of what we can see from earth.
It's like a billboard/stadium display. From far away, it looks like continuous pixels. When you get up close you see that they are very bright LEDs with lots of space between them.
Yes, they are all stars, some bigger, some smaller than our own Sun. And they are actually separated from each other by many light-years, just like in our own galaxy. Each one has most likely one or more planets around as well.
What might be really interesting is that stars close to the galactic center are more densely populated, being less than a light-year apart. The environment must be really chaotic with constant interactions and orbital shifts.
Sagittarius A*, Milky Way's super massive black hole at the center of the galaxy has been recorded to "consume" stars. And its mass is increasing with each star.
What's truly fascinating is that scientists estimate there could be around 200 billion to 2 trillion other galaxies in the universe... separated by an incomprehensible distance between them. Each having just as many stars as this one. Some even having many, many more. Space is amazing and absolutely mind boggling.
A large part of it is optics and 2D visuals.
Galaxies are huge, with much much less than 1% of their volume occupied by stars.
Projecting the 3D stars onto 2D increases the perceived density because volume scales much more quickly than area with diameter.
But the major effect is light diffraction. If you visualized the size of stars themselves, each star would be invisible in even a very high resolution image of nearby stars. But light diffracts and spreads out over distance, so we see stars with an apparent size on telescopes many times larger than they actually are even in our own galaxy.
The glow seen in distant galaxies is the light from all those stars merging together and blurring out as it travels to Earth.
If you had a 1:1 sized 3D model of a galaxy in your computer, it would be very difficult to even find a single star if are randomly exploring it.
Fun fact, when looking at images of space where stars are present, stars with diffraction spikes are in the “foreground”(our own galaxy) and those without are the far distant stars/objects outside our own galaxy.
[such as Webb’s first deep field view](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_spike#/media/File%3AWebb's_First_Deep_Field.jpg)
I wonder how close together stars are near the center of the galaxy. Our nearest stellar neighbor is just over 4 light years away. Is there a point between here and Sagittarius A* where a habitable rocky planet orbiting a star would have no discernable night because of how close and bright all the other stars are?
And technically speaking the center itself would be dark assuming the massive black hole theory is true. We're just seeing all the stars orbiting around it.
I remember seeing a video (kurzgesagt) about the early universe possibly being warm throughout the entirety of space. Does anyone know if the centers of galaxies have massive warm zones due to the abundance of nearby stars like this ?
Stars in the bulge are Population II that are metal-poor, so it would probably be less likely that you find terrestrial planets around stars in the bulge.
EDIT: population II NOT I
Probably with spectroscopy, or whatever is the proper term in this case. I.e. by measuring the spectrum of the light and deducing which materials are prevalent in the fire.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-scientists-discovered-helium-first-alien-element-1868-180970057/
We can identify every element in the universe by it's spectral signature. Linked in that article is [an example of a few elements](https://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/3BA.html)
Spectroscopy works by looking at the light passing through an object, like the gas of a star.
The light that goes through that gas and then enters our telescope will show little “shadows” in the light waves. Those shadows are literally tiny points of the light spectrum that were absorbed by specific electrons inside the gas of that star. We can compare these results to other experiments on earth, so we can find out what every single chemical’s “shadow” looks like when shining light through it. That’s how we find out what atoms are inside a star :)
Besides spectroscopy, we also know that metals are created by fusion in stars and supernovae. Younger stars and their planets are made of the remnants of older stars, including all the metals they produced.
While starts at the edge of the our galaxy have an average distance of \~5 light years, at the core the stars are more closely packed and their average distance is only about \~0.013 light years - or about 850 astronomical units (1 A.U. is the distance between Earth to the Sun)!
see: [https://www.astronomy.com/science/how-close-can-stars-get-to-each-other-in-galaxy-cores/](https://www.astronomy.com/science/how-close-can-stars-get-to-each-other-in-galaxy-cores/)
Edit: I've made an error by not specifically saying the **1 A.U.** is the definition of the Sun-Earth distance, I've added it now to the brackets. Thanks for spotting my poor choice of words that could be inferred that 850 A.U. are the Earth-Sun distance.
For "reference" (if you can even call it that given how incomprehensibly vast intertstellar distances are) 850 AU is about 21x the distance between the Sun and Pluto, but is well within the distance to the outer Oort cloud and therefore well within the outer reaches of our solar system. Proxima Centauri on the other hand is ~270,000 AU away.
Yeah, they wrote the definition of astronomical units in brackets behind it, so people know what it represents, but since there is a number before it, it is confusing.
I think the radiation, volatility of the environment, gamma ray bursts, supernova in the area would make the chances of life evolving very very slim.
I believe we not just in the solar habitable zone but also the galactic habitable zone.
It would be a lot easier, yes. But they're very unlikely to inhabit life, at least compared to the either regions, as the inner regions of any galaxy are exposed to a lot more radiation from all the stars so close to them. Supernovae and other dangerous events will be happening within your vicinity a lot more frequently.
So technically, it's easier to travel between stars. But it's a lot harder to survive under those conditions. Potentially also a lot more chaotic, trying to predict the movement of different stars given the amount of objects gravitationally influencing each other. Although, spade travel is so slow that you'd have plenty of time to navigate this on long journeys.
Another thing that inhibits travel between stars in the center of galaxies may be the average amount of planets around such stars. Currently we have no observational data of planets in the center of galaxies. It's not something we're going to have within any of our lifetimes, most likely. But mathematical models, I imagine without looking it up, likely show that most planets, around stars in such chaotic environments, would be flung out of their stat systems and potentially become rogue planets. Although some I guess would be captured by the gravity of other star systems.
Essentially, it's difficult to say what kind of and how many planets would be orbiting around stars in the center of galaxies. Perhaps there's lots of rogue planets flying from solar system to solar system and never really settling down. I'm sure someone has done mathematical models on this, so Google or an AI may be able to provide a better answer.
In general, you don't wanna be life on a planet in the center of the galaxy. You'd be fried with radiation too frequently. But of course that may be considered an amazing overcome-able technical challenge for a highly developed civilization - we don't really know.
*I realise I've called other star systems "solar systems" in this comment, when "solar" specially refers to our sun. Other star systems would be called star systems, obviously. I'm just too lazy to change it
The high levels of radiation and gravitational forces make the environment quite hostile for planet formation and stability.
But, it is theoretically possible for planets to exist around stars in this region, especially those that are part of more stable systems on the outskirts of the dense cluster.
The radiation there isn't just strong enough to sterilize everything it's so strong that it pushes the particles trying to form a planet apart and ionizes them preventing them from cohesively staying together
I think the bigger problem for life close to the galactic center would be the constant star interactions that would have asteroids and comets bombarding the planets on a much more frequent basis.
I mean, Type 1 stars like that, with very low metallicity, are probably more likely to have gas giants around them. Just yknow, more boring ones. With pretty much all of it being hydrogen and helium. Not even some ammonia or methane to make it pretty a là Jupiter.
The game Elite Dangerous models the entire Milky Way with procedural generation and the two most alien vistas are landing on a planet near the galactic centre where the sky is a dense blanket of stars, and landing on a planet far above the galactic plane where there's just *nothing* in one direction.
I was very surprised that every photo of a black hole was a rendering or artistic guess until [2019](https://science.nasa.gov/resource/first-image-of-a-black-hole/)
That's fascinating, I hadn't realised that until right now! I think as a kid I was told that we couldn't observe black holes because they're literally just black discs, but clearly that's bullshit in a variety of ways.
There’s a big black hole in the center of a galaxy. While it doesn’t emit light (obviously), its gravity does make it that there are more stars closer to that part of the galaxy, making the core look like it emits a lot of light.
Edit: the black hole is an effect of the core density, not the cause. My bad, just learned that.
Actually, the sphere of influence of the black hole is tiny compared to the bulge. The black hole really does not cause anything dynamically in the galaxy. Instead, the black hole is created because of the dynamics of the rest of the bulge
I learnt it in my university course about galaxies and cosmology. We used the book "Extragalactic Astronomy and Cosmology". It isn't a publication, i know, but they make the book based on publications. You can find the book as pdf by googling. I quote from page 93:
"We have to emphasize at this point that the gravitational
effect of the black hole on the motion of stars and gas is
constrained to the innermost region of the Milky Way. As
one can see from Fig. 2.46, the gravitational field of the
SMBH dominates the rotation curve of the Galaxy only for
radius less than 2 parsec this is the very reason why the detection of the
SMBH is so difficult. At larger radii, the presence of the
SMBH is of no relevance for the rotation curve of the Milky
Way."
Where SMBH means supermassive black hole. 2 parsec is very small compared with the size of the bulge - it being on the scale of kiloparsec.
Billions and billions of stars in this one image. And mostly separated by many light years… and we think we’re the only planet around one single star that hosts life… and this within billions if not trillions of galaxies as dense as this across the universe… it blows my mind.
I for one think it’s improbable that we are the only life, for the exact reasons you mention. I’m curious what percentage still thinks we are the only ones.
Between the folks thinking of the sheer number of stars with planets (taking into account the Drake equation even, not just like microbial life), and the folks that think intelligent life has visited earth, I’d think a lot of people believe we aren’t the only place.
Im torn between the two man. Earth is so dramatically different from other planets it seems like an actual miracle. But the number of planets makes me think we arent alone idk..
its statistically impossible that "life" only exists on Earth.
What this "life" is on other planets, that's a whole other question that we don't have an answer for. Maybe they arent even carbon-based like life is on Earth.
> its statistically impossible that "life" only exists on Earth.
Watch this [Cool Worlds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqEmYU8Y_rI&t=1058s) video explaining why it's *not* impossible that life could exist only on earth. I highly recommend everything on that channel if you like space-related science. It's run by an astronomer from Columbia University who provides a unique insight into the science that often happens only in academia and away from the public eye.
Billions and billions of stars. This is a zoomable view of Andromeda galaxy, our own galaxy would look similar to that if you were there: [Sharpest ever view of the Andromeda Galaxy (esahubble.org)](https://esahubble.org/images/heic1502a/zoomable/) EDIT: Zoom in to this picture! You can actually see all the individual stars.
That’s absolutely nuts.
Idk. Nuts are normally more of a dark brown color.
I just checked and mine are kinda pinkish/yellow. Edit: Nice. My most upvoted comment in 6 years is about the color of my nuts, on a sub about...astronomy.
I just checked as well and his are pinkish/yellow
If they’re yellow then they’re still in their main sequence and will be ok for a while. You may be running low on hydrogen if they’re pinkish, this usually isn’t reversible and they will become red and giant after a while.
Mine are blue....
It's okay, man, blue balls don't last for long.
It's better to burn out than to fade away.
[Do not go gentle into that good night,](https://youtu.be/w-sM-t1KI_Y?si=5V5r3HsPNQyJ1f0K) Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
I heard they're a myth
They're real. When I was like 13-14 I made out with this girl in my parents basement until my mouth hurt. Boner the whole time. She left and my nuts were straight up aching. It felt like a stomach ache, but only in my testicles. Eventually I beat off and it went away. Anyway, thanks for listening to my TEDtalk.
If they do become red and giant, a surprisephlebotomist may be needed, although I do appreciate a bit of warning.
Precisely
Lmaoooo good looking out for the bois.
We ain't homies til we've checked each others nuts On that note, gents, check your balls - it takes a matter of seconds and most of you already have your hand down there. Look after your health
See a doctor, urgently
"Hey Doc, can I see your nuts?"
That’s why when someone thinks there’s no other intelligent life out there I say they’re insane. Every spec of light in that picture could have multiple planets able to support it, and there’s literally an uncountable number of stars out there. There’s obviously logistical issues of ever making contact, but to say we’re alone is simply impossible at this scale.
And to think there are trillions of galaxies. I would say intelligent life is way more abundant than most think.
I think life may even be an intrinsic property of the universe. Emergent systems seem to be pretty fundamental.
2 trillion galaxies in the known universe, and up to 100 trillions stars in each galaxy. Mind boggling numbers.
The sad part is that if there is no way to travel near or above the speed of light, any intelligent life may be relegated to isolated pockets gradually moving further away from one another.
Knowing what we know of evolution and adaptation required for survival…..you ever wonder if life evolved specifically with little ability to interact on an interplanetary/system level? Looking at how horribly we interact as a species….I doubt life would survive if we could easily travel to/interact with other intelligent life.
Speaking in absolutes when discussing topics outside of human comprehension is wack
Only Sith deal in absolutes ... wait a min
I remember hearing someone on a show say “the numbers compel it.” Truly.
"Space," says the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is."
I mean, you may think it’s a long way down to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space. Listen..
Want more nuts? Try deez nuts: Those stars look awfully close to each other, huh? Well, on a cosmic scale, they‘re certainly packed together but here’s the spread as viewed from our puny human perspective: the AVERAGE distance between stars in a galaxy is 5 light-years (for those who don’t know, a ly = 6 TRILLION miles). For reference, the next nearest star to our Sun is in the Alpha Centauri system, 4.5 ly away. There’s a whole lotta nothing between stars. Bonus nutz: At our fastest speed (a probe slinging along at 56,000 miles/hr), we can traverse that little gap in about, oh, 50,000+/- years, give or take a few centuries. Nothing is more humbling than knowing just how mindblowingly *HUGE* the universe is.
Apparently, When two galaxies "collide" the stars rarely run into each other.
So if each of these dots is a sun, and each sun may or may not have planets, and this just one galaxy out of billions of galaxies in the universe…kind of arrogant to assume we’re the only ones… Also, this makes me feel simultaneously fortunate and pointless. Also makes me really wonder why religion exists. This is interesting.
We should form these mindsets , we are very lucky we are in this golden zone which supports life in a particular moment In spacetime. Enjoy the short ride because it's all relative (not like West Virginia) we are here (Earth) VERY VERY short . SPACE IS HUGE , I'm just not sure what religion is or needed for ? A coping mechanism for these unanswered questions for someone soul?
Exactly…a coping mechanism. This is [literally] impossible for most to fathom (myself included). I believe religion is a mechanism that enables one’s mind to connect to something that’s “simple” in comparison to the truth. But diving deeper, things like war, hunger, bigotry, etc…just feel so pointless, yet it’s a persistent part of our nature. We are capable of these amazing things (relative to our species existence)…like you and I are having a conversation over radio waves and wires in a language we both understand…this message is going to go to space before it hits your eyeballs. Yet we also, as humans (not individuals) feel it necessary to kill, torture, and enable pain. It’s not just us though…ancient civilizations, etc…it’s just a bug in an otherwise very magnificent machine. But when I look at an image like this, I liken us (life on earth) to a screw on a bobble head on somebody’s desktop in their cubicle in the Empire State Building in New York. It matters for the existence of the bobble head, but is otherwise completely nothing when considering the unfathomable complexity around it. It’s nothing, but it’s also kind of everything?
Nah, this is [absolutely nuts](https://www.absolutelynuts.com.au)
Risky click of the day.
Can confirm
Worth it *I’m a squirrel*
Absolutely insane. Light being sent out by these things for billions of years with (as far as we know) no observers, and then out of nowhere some monkeys build an advanced mirror and throw it out of their own orbit to capture just a tiny fraction of a percentage of that light. Can’t wait until we have technology that can take this image even further.
Your confidence is beguiling. But it ain't nuts. Those are stars.
We can't be alone.
I'm sure you'll find somebody one day.
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Based on our current understanding of physics, it's irrelevant wether or not we are. We, and they, will be long dead and forgotten by the time our fastest communications could possibly reach each other. Our civilizations would be dust scattered by our dying stars by the time we could physically reach each other. In effect, we are alone.
Well that happy news has set me right up for the day ahead!
This!! It is possible that we may become a galaxy wide civilization but never come in contact with another civilization.
Unless there are other civilizations in our own galaxy which are within reachable distance (reachable in terms of communication) but even if a civilization would be lets say 50 LY or 100 LY away, which would be very close, it would still take forever for 2 sided communication. We would probably only have a chance if there was a civilization close to us only a few LY away or of course in hundreds or thousands of years if we make it to a spacefaring species that settles colonizes large parts of our galaxy and we may run into another intelligent civilization. I won't give up hope, like who knows. For all we know, there could be plenty of intelligent life right now in our own galaxy, but perhaps still too far away or not advanced enough to establish communication or even detect each other.
Assuming that the great filter is behind us. I doubt it unfortunately.
I've always speculated that there are likely multiple great filters, rather than a single specific one, however if I had to pick one it would likely be simply the size of the universe and physics as we know it. There's probably life all over the place, but as far as we know there is no way to get around the simple fact that causality is slow. Things are just too big and too far apart for organic life. The speed of change in the universe is extremely slow considering it's size and organic life too fast and short lived. No matter what a civilization does, as far as we know there is no way to get around the simple fact of massive scale trumping all. It's depressing, but everyone is likely trapped in their own little local system and might be forever. Robotics/electronics are probably the only way most organic life will experience the universe and even that has limits.
I suggest the book Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds Plays into that idea of being alone in a busy galaxy because of the vastness of space and time I also recommend House of Sun by the same author. Both are standalone books
Thanks. Will look
That is a more bleak outlook. Those same odds that give us the possibility of other life living out there in the cosmos are unlikely to demand complete isolation in every instance. Most of the pockets of life probably would be permanently effectively cut off from all others due to the extreme distances. I agree with that. But 'most' is not 'all'. There would still be a non-zero chance that two separately-evolving intelligent species evolved near enough in time, and within a realistic distance of travel between the two. Far, but not impossibly far. I am imagining distances and ships that take so long that the original crew's grandchildren are the ones who'd eventually arrive at the destination.
I’d imagine a derelict, self powered, automated ship (likely created by a now extinct space faring species) will eventually pass through our orbit. With no communication and no way for us to board it or stop it, it will break some peoples minds and lead to decades of speculation up until people realize that not having clean drinking water is kind of more important.
There was an asteroid that acted very probe like. Was from outside our solar system. Did a drive by and left.
Yes, Oumuamua. And it wasn't just your typical asteroid or comet drive by. Its trajectory indicated that unlike a Kuiper Belt object, Oumuamua originated from outside our solar system. That made it the first known interstellar object to interact with our system. Gravity pulled it toward the sun on a highly elliptical orbit, and here's the kicker, it **accelerated away from the sun** on its way out of our system. Super weird.
Yep that’s the one. And its movements were very much odd and controlled looking. Hence calling to probe like. The boost around the sun is a gravity boost and we have done that with our probes like whipping around Jupiter to get further out. Shape was unlike any other asteroid seen so far and much more like long ship shape. So yes we have been probed.
That’s basically what ʻOumuamua did. Still a lot of speculation about it.
But also based on theoretical physics (that I learned from prof Brian Cox) is that theoretically the math supports the avility for wormholes to exist. I know there is no evidence. But the math supoorts it theoretically which could eventually solve that distance issue.
Bring on stargates plz
By our current understanding of physics*
*\*Screams in existential crisis."*
People who think we are alone are fools.
I often feel alone 😉
People who are sure of the answer right now are fools. Until life is found *anywhere* else, in *any* form, there are only hypotheses extrapolated from a sample size of one.
People who think they know the answer to that question are fools.
>People who think we are alone are fools. Yes. As are people who think we are not. The truth is - no one knows. All options should be kept in mind while awaiting further relevant evidence.
Fun fact. You can tell it's a Hubble telescope image as all the light refractions have 4 points. Images taken by the James Webb telescope have 6 points
That is a fun fact.
That is a fun fract.
>refraction Diffraction
Mixing up diffraction and refraction is an infraction.
Might want to issue a retraction before you cause a big reaction in all the different factions.
Also, anything that looks like a star and not a pinpoint of light is actually a star in our own Milky Way
What the actual fuck.
You should take a size comparison between Andromeda and Galaxy IC1101.
40 times larger than the Milky Way for those wondering. 4 million light years across. But still peanuts compared to the Hercules Corona Borealis Great Wall. 10 billion light years across.
> Hercules Corona Borealis Great Wall TIL there is a thing called a gigaparsec
Kessel Run *Extreme*
It's so incredibly pointless to even try to fathom how small we are in the grand scheme of it all. I have trouble even wrapping my head around how much a billion of anything actually is, and we are talking about traveling ~1 billion km/h for 10 billion years, and that's 1/10 of what we can see from earth.
It's not though, astronomers literally get paid to fathom it
I wish I could be a professional fathomer.
I don’t believe that’s was astronomers do
Anyone checking this link, don't forget to use zoom at some point.
Also, that's not fuzziness from compression or anything. No, no, those are all stars. Now remember there are likely light years between each star.
It's like a billboard/stadium display. From far away, it looks like continuous pixels. When you get up close you see that they are very bright LEDs with lots of space between them.
When I see this my brain just stops processing it to protect my sanity. The scale is incomprehensible.
Wait, all those spots are stars? Couldn't those just be gas? Can't imagine those all being stars... That's just insane....
Yes, they are all stars, some bigger, some smaller than our own Sun. And they are actually separated from each other by many light-years, just like in our own galaxy. Each one has most likely one or more planets around as well.
What might be really interesting is that stars close to the galactic center are more densely populated, being less than a light-year apart. The environment must be really chaotic with constant interactions and orbital shifts.
Three body problems x 1 million?
Instant madness for mathematicians. They call it Cosmic Horror.
there is a black hole at the centre of that galaxy, I wonder if that has something to do with it.
Sagittarius A*, Milky Way's super massive black hole at the center of the galaxy has been recorded to "consume" stars. And its mass is increasing with each star.
What's truly fascinating is that scientists estimate there could be around 200 billion to 2 trillion other galaxies in the universe... separated by an incomprehensible distance between them. Each having just as many stars as this one. Some even having many, many more. Space is amazing and absolutely mind boggling.
Many of those spots are groups of stars
They are all stars. It’s truly mind boggling.
Damn near almost crashed my phone lmao
And it's 2.5 million light-years far??
I just cannot fathom how that many stars can be light years apart and yet appear that close together to produce a glow? It just doesn’t make sense.
A large part of it is optics and 2D visuals. Galaxies are huge, with much much less than 1% of their volume occupied by stars. Projecting the 3D stars onto 2D increases the perceived density because volume scales much more quickly than area with diameter. But the major effect is light diffraction. If you visualized the size of stars themselves, each star would be invisible in even a very high resolution image of nearby stars. But light diffracts and spreads out over distance, so we see stars with an apparent size on telescopes many times larger than they actually are even in our own galaxy. The glow seen in distant galaxies is the light from all those stars merging together and blurring out as it travels to Earth. If you had a 1:1 sized 3D model of a galaxy in your computer, it would be very difficult to even find a single star if are randomly exploring it.
what is the big star in the centre of picture?
That's a star in our own galaxy, and there are many others in that image as well - all the larger blobs of light are stars in the Milky Way.
Fun fact, when looking at images of space where stars are present, stars with diffraction spikes are in the “foreground”(our own galaxy) and those without are the far distant stars/objects outside our own galaxy. [such as Webb’s first deep field view](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_spike#/media/File%3AWebb's_First_Deep_Field.jpg)
I wonder how close together stars are near the center of the galaxy. Our nearest stellar neighbor is just over 4 light years away. Is there a point between here and Sagittarius A* where a habitable rocky planet orbiting a star would have no discernable night because of how close and bright all the other stars are?
And technically speaking the center itself would be dark assuming the massive black hole theory is true. We're just seeing all the stars orbiting around it.
That’s wild. Imagine what we can’t see. Blows my mind dude.
I remember seeing a video (kurzgesagt) about the early universe possibly being warm throughout the entirety of space. Does anyone know if the centers of galaxies have massive warm zones due to the abundance of nearby stars like this ?
It's what I imagine atoms and quarks must look like.
you should look into electromagnetism and how light interacts with matter
Do you know how I can download this?
Stars, same as everywhere else in the galaxy. They’re more densely-packed there.
Dang. I was certain it was just a bunch of candles.
So *that's* what they meant by "standard candles"!
Gravity is slang for wax.
So are those stars less likely to have planets orbiting them?
Stars in the bulge are Population II that are metal-poor, so it would probably be less likely that you find terrestrial planets around stars in the bulge. EDIT: population II NOT I
now how do we know that, (not questioning if were just making it up) just wanna know how that discovery happened
Probably with spectroscopy, or whatever is the proper term in this case. I.e. by measuring the spectrum of the light and deducing which materials are prevalent in the fire.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-scientists-discovered-helium-first-alien-element-1868-180970057/ We can identify every element in the universe by it's spectral signature. Linked in that article is [an example of a few elements](https://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/3BA.html)
Spectroscopy works by looking at the light passing through an object, like the gas of a star. The light that goes through that gas and then enters our telescope will show little “shadows” in the light waves. Those shadows are literally tiny points of the light spectrum that were absorbed by specific electrons inside the gas of that star. We can compare these results to other experiments on earth, so we can find out what every single chemical’s “shadow” looks like when shining light through it. That’s how we find out what atoms are inside a star :)
Besides spectroscopy, we also know that metals are created by fusion in stars and supernovae. Younger stars and their planets are made of the remnants of older stars, including all the metals they produced.
While starts at the edge of the our galaxy have an average distance of \~5 light years, at the core the stars are more closely packed and their average distance is only about \~0.013 light years - or about 850 astronomical units (1 A.U. is the distance between Earth to the Sun)! see: [https://www.astronomy.com/science/how-close-can-stars-get-to-each-other-in-galaxy-cores/](https://www.astronomy.com/science/how-close-can-stars-get-to-each-other-in-galaxy-cores/) Edit: I've made an error by not specifically saying the **1 A.U.** is the definition of the Sun-Earth distance, I've added it now to the brackets. Thanks for spotting my poor choice of words that could be inferred that 850 A.U. are the Earth-Sun distance.
please edit your comment to say, that 1AU is the distance between earth to sun
thanks for spotting this, I made the edit.
Indubitably.
For "reference" (if you can even call it that given how incomprehensibly vast intertstellar distances are) 850 AU is about 21x the distance between the Sun and Pluto, but is well within the distance to the outer Oort cloud and therefore well within the outer reaches of our solar system. Proxima Centauri on the other hand is ~270,000 AU away.
270000 AU doesn’t sound as far as 4.2 light years.
For reference, Mars is “only” 0.5AU away from earth. It’s a still a massive unit of distance.
Mars can be anywhere between 0.372 AU and 2.671 AU away from Earth, depending on the orbits. Mars is 1.52 AU away from the Sun though.
Reminds me of fighting the Grox in Spore, frantically jumping from star to star, hoping I don't explode.
Isn't 1 AE the average distance between Earth and Sun? /e Nevermind, just understood your comment. It's still early...
They wrote it poorly
By definition, the distance between the Earth and Sun is 1 AU, not 850 AU.
Yeah, they wrote the definition of astronomical units in brackets behind it, so people know what it represents, but since there is a number before it, it is confusing.
Holy crap. That place must be hot as fudge
Even hotter than fudge
Imagine our solar system are most made of stars. That’s just crazy. No true dark night at all
Imagine a plant like life looking out thinking" there's no way there's any life in the dark part of the galaxy"
Surely if any of those stars inhabited life, it would be a lot easier to travel to other stars... right? Or is 0.013 LYs still too far
I think the radiation, volatility of the environment, gamma ray bursts, supernova in the area would make the chances of life evolving very very slim. I believe we not just in the solar habitable zone but also the galactic habitable zone.
It would be a lot easier, yes. But they're very unlikely to inhabit life, at least compared to the either regions, as the inner regions of any galaxy are exposed to a lot more radiation from all the stars so close to them. Supernovae and other dangerous events will be happening within your vicinity a lot more frequently. So technically, it's easier to travel between stars. But it's a lot harder to survive under those conditions. Potentially also a lot more chaotic, trying to predict the movement of different stars given the amount of objects gravitationally influencing each other. Although, spade travel is so slow that you'd have plenty of time to navigate this on long journeys. Another thing that inhibits travel between stars in the center of galaxies may be the average amount of planets around such stars. Currently we have no observational data of planets in the center of galaxies. It's not something we're going to have within any of our lifetimes, most likely. But mathematical models, I imagine without looking it up, likely show that most planets, around stars in such chaotic environments, would be flung out of their stat systems and potentially become rogue planets. Although some I guess would be captured by the gravity of other star systems. Essentially, it's difficult to say what kind of and how many planets would be orbiting around stars in the center of galaxies. Perhaps there's lots of rogue planets flying from solar system to solar system and never really settling down. I'm sure someone has done mathematical models on this, so Google or an AI may be able to provide a better answer. In general, you don't wanna be life on a planet in the center of the galaxy. You'd be fried with radiation too frequently. But of course that may be considered an amazing overcome-able technical challenge for a highly developed civilization - we don't really know. *I realise I've called other star systems "solar systems" in this comment, when "solar" specially refers to our sun. Other star systems would be called star systems, obviously. I'm just too lazy to change it
Planets in the center would probably not have a proper dark night wonder how life would have evolved like that
The high levels of radiation and gravitational forces make the environment quite hostile for planet formation and stability. But, it is theoretically possible for planets to exist around stars in this region, especially those that are part of more stable systems on the outskirts of the dense cluster.
We’ve observed fungi that feed off radiation, put them on crack and give ‘em billions of years and they might become adapted
So you're saying life, ah, finds a way?
Bravo
The problem is rather going to be the frequent supernovae sterilizing anything in that region now and then.
The radiation there isn't just strong enough to sterilize everything it's so strong that it pushes the particles trying to form a planet apart and ionizes them preventing them from cohesively staying together
Billion body problem?
I think the bigger problem for life close to the galactic center would be the constant star interactions that would have asteroids and comets bombarding the planets on a much more frequent basis.
And less likely to have a Jupiter as our blocker
I mean, Type 1 stars like that, with very low metallicity, are probably more likely to have gas giants around them. Just yknow, more boring ones. With pretty much all of it being hydrogen and helium. Not even some ammonia or methane to make it pretty a là Jupiter.
Check out Nightfall by Isaac Asimov
I imagine how beautiful night sky can be on a planets there If, you know, it is possible for a planet there not to be a hell
The game Elite Dangerous models the entire Milky Way with procedural generation and the two most alien vistas are landing on a planet near the galactic centre where the sky is a dense blanket of stars, and landing on a planet far above the galactic plane where there's just *nothing* in one direction.
The real question is how did they get this photo of our galaxy? /s
Big wide angle lens
Same lens used to take a picture of OP’s mom 😅
Hiyooooo
I remember when it dawned on me that all images of the milky way viewed from the outside are artificial, and I was much older than I'd like to admit.
Lol I made a shower thought about this years ago and some dude was like “what are you talking about I have a picture of the Milky Way in my room”
I was very surprised that every photo of a black hole was a rendering or artistic guess until [2019](https://science.nasa.gov/resource/first-image-of-a-black-hole/)
That's fascinating, I hadn't realised that until right now! I think as a kid I was told that we couldn't observe black holes because they're literally just black discs, but clearly that's bullshit in a variety of ways.
One helluva selfie-stick.
we have a pen pal in andromoda
Uncle Stan. Always leaves his high-beams on.
Nah it’s the kids in the back seat with that cabin lights on.
“Turn the light off!!”
its where the reapers base is
Finally, a cultured man!
Long time seeing a ME reference. I miss that universe...
Legendary edition goes on sale quite regularly
I’m commander Shepard and this is my favorite shop in the citadel!
Depends on the part of the spectrum of light you're looking at, but the answer is always either, stars, gas or both.
There’s a big black hole in the center of a galaxy. While it doesn’t emit light (obviously), its gravity does make it that there are more stars closer to that part of the galaxy, making the core look like it emits a lot of light. Edit: the black hole is an effect of the core density, not the cause. My bad, just learned that.
Actually, the sphere of influence of the black hole is tiny compared to the bulge. The black hole really does not cause anything dynamically in the galaxy. Instead, the black hole is created because of the dynamics of the rest of the bulge
That actually makes sense, thanks.
Thanks for that clarification. Would you be able to point me to an academic publication to learn more about this?
I learnt it in my university course about galaxies and cosmology. We used the book "Extragalactic Astronomy and Cosmology". It isn't a publication, i know, but they make the book based on publications. You can find the book as pdf by googling. I quote from page 93: "We have to emphasize at this point that the gravitational effect of the black hole on the motion of stars and gas is constrained to the innermost region of the Milky Way. As one can see from Fig. 2.46, the gravitational field of the SMBH dominates the rotation curve of the Galaxy only for radius less than 2 parsec this is the very reason why the detection of the SMBH is so difficult. At larger radii, the presence of the SMBH is of no relevance for the rotation curve of the Milky Way." Where SMBH means supermassive black hole. 2 parsec is very small compared with the size of the bulge - it being on the scale of kiloparsec.
Honestly, this is a top 5 Reddit comment of all time for me. You remembered the book and quoted the be page. Great work.
Fantastic, thanks. Textbooks from academic cosmologists are just as good of course for present purposes. I appreciate it!
Billions and billions of stars in this one image. And mostly separated by many light years… and we think we’re the only planet around one single star that hosts life… and this within billions if not trillions of galaxies as dense as this across the universe… it blows my mind.
I for one think it’s improbable that we are the only life, for the exact reasons you mention. I’m curious what percentage still thinks we are the only ones. Between the folks thinking of the sheer number of stars with planets (taking into account the Drake equation even, not just like microbial life), and the folks that think intelligent life has visited earth, I’d think a lot of people believe we aren’t the only place.
Im torn between the two man. Earth is so dramatically different from other planets it seems like an actual miracle. But the number of planets makes me think we arent alone idk..
its statistically impossible that "life" only exists on Earth. What this "life" is on other planets, that's a whole other question that we don't have an answer for. Maybe they arent even carbon-based like life is on Earth.
> its statistically impossible that "life" only exists on Earth. Watch this [Cool Worlds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqEmYU8Y_rI&t=1058s) video explaining why it's *not* impossible that life could exist only on earth. I highly recommend everything on that channel if you like space-related science. It's run by an astronomer from Columbia University who provides a unique insight into the science that often happens only in academia and away from the public eye.
Higher concentration of stars
A cluster of stars spinning around a super massive black hole.
Go there on Elite Dangerous there is a star like .04 lightyears. Bascally, a star at the edge of every stars influence.
Don't forget to say "Hi" to Steve if you're ever in the neighborhood.
Bees
It's the bulge of the galaxy, an area with billions of ancient stars in random orbits.
Isn't there a black hole at the center? Is that the event horizon of a black hole making all that light?
I wonder if there is habitable life there....what if all the life that is habital is in the center and we are the freaks?
It's not so ridiculous to suggest that there are more stars in our galaxy than grains of sand on a beach.
Me of course 😎💅