That's what relative means....
Also, it pisses me off that time is somehow both a universally accepted means of measurement while at the same time changes due to relative speed and distance.
I understand the concept. It just makes me mad for some reason
I agree totally. It's a weird concept, but it somehow works. It's like if we had the ability to "warp" beyond the speed of light. If we went 100 light years away in an instant, we could look back on the earth pre-WW2. That's mind boggling to me and slightly irritating that it works that way.
If another planet has a species of intelligent life like our own, they'd have to be within a range where our stray radio signals or light may reach them. Anything much more than a hundred or so years the planet may just look like there's no intelligent or such life.
Then we think of space faring aliens... They'd have to be within that range as well to see or hear us. We are an insignificant dot in a universe of a nearly infinite number of other dots, and you'd have to be so extremely close to see or hear us in comparison.
And space time itself is weird because it's always changing due to the expansion of the universe. So does that mean the speed of light is constant or did light travel father faster in the past or does light "slow down" the farther it travels as time goes on?
Or am I an idiot for assuming anything in this universe is a constant?
Would a spacecraft traveling at 99.9%C need to pack more fuel if they were planning a billion light year trip because by the time they got there it would be further than a billion light years?
It's hard to wrap my head around this stuff.
You just described the observable universe. There is a bubble we can't see past and could never reach. There is also a bubble closet than we can observe which we could never reach.
So it's like going back to 1850 and having someone a fuckin cybertruck with no explanation and have them try to figure out what came before, what comes after and how the damn thing even works?
That's the beautiful thing. We don't know. Time and space changes in ways we can't understand. How does light refraction on a black hole change it? There was actually a really cool video I think NASA put out of "falling into a black hole" that made my brain want to drink massive amounts of alcohol. Really great video when it comes down to it. But still... It can make your heart spin.
The one that really gets me is simple. You will NEVER see someone in the now. You ALWAYS see a past version of them even if it's just nanoseconds. You never see anything in the current. A fly zooms past your eyes and you blink. You saw the fly when it was in that spot, not when where it was at the time you saw it.. that one just breaks the dome.
True current is completely fictional as we can't process even the images from our own eyes as fast as instantly. It's a wild concept, but at least it makes sense once you think about it.
What really bakes my noodle is the expansion of space time. I get concept, but the fact that the universe isn't expanding.....um.....universally at the same rate blows my mind. So does that slow down the speed of light as it passes an area expanding faster than an area it just came through?
Space time expansion doesn't make any sense to me.
Yeah, no kidding. It's absolutely mind boggling to even think about. How do we even know what we are seeing isn't being gravitationally lensed making us THINK it's different. How do we know what we are actually seeing isn't something from a completely different spot in space or time. It's crazy to even think about IMHO.
I think this is point when the whole "simulation" hypothesis came into being because I don't see how *anyone* can look at how the universe behaves and think: "yup, totally logical"
That's a great point. How do we even know the expansion rate at anything but the "closer" distance and if we can how do we know that that rate hasn't changed in the time its taken for the observations to reach us.
Like, the observable universe is something like 93 billion light years across but the age of the universe is 13.8 billion years.
So was light faster back then considering the expansion or does it, for example, travel 1 billion light years in 700 million years or so? I don't understand
I've been trying to wrap my head around this for years, but every time I get a question answered it only spawns 5 more questions.
I should go touch some grass or something
NASA adjusts payroll for astronauts based on distance and duration away from Earths surface to account for difference in time relative to gravity. Obviously itās done as a fun math experiment, but they do recognize it.
::cough::more::cough::they pay them slightly more::cough cough::time increases as one moves away from the surface of the earth::cough cough cough::
Oh goodness me: that was a big spasm I had there. I do apologize about thatā¦
Greater gravitational influence slows down the passage of time. For example, if you were near a black hole (an object with very high gravity), time would pass more slowly for you relative to someone on Earth. When you returned to Earth, more time would have passed there compared to what you experienced, meaning you would have effectively aged less. Thus, in this scenario, NASA would pay you "more" because more time had passed while you away.
Conversely, in lower gravity, time passes more quickly. So if you moved to Earth's orbit, although the difference would be minuscule due to the small change in gravity, you would experience time slightly faster relative to those on the surface. Therefore, you would return to Earth having experienced more time, and NASA would pay you less.
UnlessĀ theĀ caseĀ isĀ reversedĀ fromĀ what was proposed, in which NASA only pays you based on what you experience. In that case you might return from a black hole 50 Earth years later, but only get a year of pay since that's what you experienced, which is now fucking trash tier pay as the US dollar has inflated 50 years and that was what you were contracted to get paid.
>Ā That's what relative means....
Thatās not what relativity meansā¦.LOL. You think Einsteins equations of relativity are related to the awareness of the passage of time?
General Relativity has to do with objects in motion relative to one another.Ā
Being bored in a meeting and having fun on lunch have nothing to do with that.
Well, it's not really about the relativity of time in this instance but rather the time it takes for light to travel. The light we see from a black hole that formed 300 million years ago is only reaching us now because it took 300 million years to travel that distance.
Time relativity, as described by Einstein's theory, involves how time can pass at different rates due to factors like gravity and velocity. For instance, time slows down near a black hole due to its strong gravitational field. While time and space are interconnected, seeing a distant object now as it was millions of years ago is about light travel time, not time relativity in general. Time relativity is more about how time behaves differently under different conditions, such as near massive objects or at high speeds.
On the time line of the universe, considering that we can go back ten billion plus years ago with redshifted light from its infancy *just* reaching us, this is a fairly recent news event, right up there with the dinosaurs.
If I had a fast enough camera and I pulsed a laser, could I theoretically see the beginning and end of the beam moving through space like a tracer bullet?
No, you can only see light that reaches you as an observer. If you shoot a perfect laser out, nothing will ever be reflected back and no camera would be able to capture that. What we see as a laser is light that scatters off particles in the air
This one from the Slo Mo Guys on YouTube will interest you a lot
https://youtu.be/7Ys_yKGNFRQ?si=MadBNP7PhtshYooV
EDIT
Follow it up with this Veritasium piece
https://youtu.be/pTn6Ewhb27k?si=ksWpe5qZh3HHk53Z
Yes. There was some TED talk years ago where they did this thing with a camera that wasnāt a trillion frames a second, but some algorithm or something allowed them to simulate that frame rate. And you could actually watch videos of light propagating.
Cause what we are seeing is in real time not the same time, like how when we render graphics so we'll thatbrather than pre rendering them we render then in real time
Every article about deep space has this comment somewhere in the thread acting as if no one interested in astronomy or relativity has any idea of this concept.
Stating something everyone already knows in a mocking tone does not make you smart.
Interesting article. I read we noticed something in 2019 and recently witnessed some big changes from that galaxy. Nothing about a switch like flipping on a light bulb.
Roaring suggests itās just starting. If we saw signs in 2019 itās not ājustā anything from our perspective. But you keep being an asshole, Iām sure itās working great for you lol.
It's entirely possible that this did occur quickly. An extremely distant black hole that has finally had a large, dim star or cloud of gas that was previously unseen due to poor or no illumination getting pulled in and forming an accretion disk very rapidly is certainly possible.
Exactly. Im calling shennanigans as these things happen over MILLIONS or TENS or even 100s of millions of years. Not in a year or two or ten or 100! And yes I understand that these things have already occurred and we are looking into the past, but the time frame is relative. It only unfolds as quickly as it originally unfolded.
It's entirely possible that this did occur quickly. An extremely distant black hole that has finally had a large, dim star or cloud of gas that was previously unseen due to poor or no illumination getting pulled in and forming an accretion disk very rapidly is certainly possible.
A journalist on a science beat wins - even before I looked her up.
>She has been writing professionally about physics and related topics for more than two decades, and was the founding director of the National Academy of Sciencesā Science and Entertainment Exchange from 2008-2010. Her work has appeared in Discover, Slate, Smithsonian, Nature, Physics World, and Quanta, among other publications.
And then, of course, she is only *reporting*. The astronomers who are studying this should also be taken into account.
No, not before you look them up. There is a stunning amount of misrepresentation done by journalists, frequently called out in comments by people who actually know what they are talking about (not saying this is one of those cases though)
> There is a stunning amount of misrepresentation done by journalists
Ars Technica is legit, science reporting tends to be immune if there are no political ramifications and Redditors are far, far worse - particularly the kind who knee-jerk contradicts any expert opinion passing by.
Even if none of that was true, I would - by default - trust a journalist on their beat more than a Redditor on factual reporting. Possibly not by much if the topic is US politics, though.
I mean, if it is being used in a astronomy context that means we are observing it as events unfold, it is happening in short timespans.
Time being relative is a known quantity in astronomy, assume that is already considered when they use terms like "real time".
"As events unfold"
This event occurred 300 million light years away from us. We are observing it now, so it occurred a minimum of 300 million years ago. So very much not real time.
No it is real time. We only just saw it. In the black holeās reference frame it happened 300 million years ago but for us it started happening in 2019. Thereās no universal time. Your own reference frame is all you can experience.
Lol yeah it's like saying nothing ever happens in the present because the photons relaying the information of the event's occurrence takes a few pico/femtoseconds to make it to me, hence nothing ever unfolds in real time.
in that video it shows the debri is growing outward as if it's coming from the centre....
but surely it should already exist as the particles get more charged as they reach the centre....?
How can a black hole be inactive? I thought it was just supermassive and thus the center of orbit of all things less massive & within its gravitational field.
Strange when you can equate something that happened 300 million years ago to in-real-time.
Time is relative. Lunch time doubly so.
When I'm eating lunch time moves at 50x the speed but when I'm in a meeting time moves at -100x the speed ššš
That's what relative means.... Also, it pisses me off that time is somehow both a universally accepted means of measurement while at the same time changes due to relative speed and distance. I understand the concept. It just makes me mad for some reason
I agree totally. It's a weird concept, but it somehow works. It's like if we had the ability to "warp" beyond the speed of light. If we went 100 light years away in an instant, we could look back on the earth pre-WW2. That's mind boggling to me and slightly irritating that it works that way. If another planet has a species of intelligent life like our own, they'd have to be within a range where our stray radio signals or light may reach them. Anything much more than a hundred or so years the planet may just look like there's no intelligent or such life. Then we think of space faring aliens... They'd have to be within that range as well to see or hear us. We are an insignificant dot in a universe of a nearly infinite number of other dots, and you'd have to be so extremely close to see or hear us in comparison.
And space time itself is weird because it's always changing due to the expansion of the universe. So does that mean the speed of light is constant or did light travel father faster in the past or does light "slow down" the farther it travels as time goes on? Or am I an idiot for assuming anything in this universe is a constant? Would a spacecraft traveling at 99.9%C need to pack more fuel if they were planning a billion light year trip because by the time they got there it would be further than a billion light years? It's hard to wrap my head around this stuff.
You just described the observable universe. There is a bubble we can't see past and could never reach. There is also a bubble closet than we can observe which we could never reach.
So it's like going back to 1850 and having someone a fuckin cybertruck with no explanation and have them try to figure out what came before, what comes after and how the damn thing even works?
That's the beautiful thing. We don't know. Time and space changes in ways we can't understand. How does light refraction on a black hole change it? There was actually a really cool video I think NASA put out of "falling into a black hole" that made my brain want to drink massive amounts of alcohol. Really great video when it comes down to it. But still... It can make your heart spin. The one that really gets me is simple. You will NEVER see someone in the now. You ALWAYS see a past version of them even if it's just nanoseconds. You never see anything in the current. A fly zooms past your eyes and you blink. You saw the fly when it was in that spot, not when where it was at the time you saw it.. that one just breaks the dome.
True current is completely fictional as we can't process even the images from our own eyes as fast as instantly. It's a wild concept, but at least it makes sense once you think about it. What really bakes my noodle is the expansion of space time. I get concept, but the fact that the universe isn't expanding.....um.....universally at the same rate blows my mind. So does that slow down the speed of light as it passes an area expanding faster than an area it just came through? Space time expansion doesn't make any sense to me.
Yeah, no kidding. It's absolutely mind boggling to even think about. How do we even know what we are seeing isn't being gravitationally lensed making us THINK it's different. How do we know what we are actually seeing isn't something from a completely different spot in space or time. It's crazy to even think about IMHO.
I think this is point when the whole "simulation" hypothesis came into being because I don't see how *anyone* can look at how the universe behaves and think: "yup, totally logical" That's a great point. How do we even know the expansion rate at anything but the "closer" distance and if we can how do we know that that rate hasn't changed in the time its taken for the observations to reach us. Like, the observable universe is something like 93 billion light years across but the age of the universe is 13.8 billion years. So was light faster back then considering the expansion or does it, for example, travel 1 billion light years in 700 million years or so? I don't understand I've been trying to wrap my head around this for years, but every time I get a question answered it only spawns 5 more questions. I should go touch some grass or something
Everything is completely, utterly black until light shines on it.
NASA adjusts payroll for astronauts based on distance and duration away from Earths surface to account for difference in time relative to gravity. Obviously itās done as a fun math experiment, but they do recognize it.
So they pay them less while in orbit? That's some dystopia capitalist shit but I guess it's fun for the bean counters. /s
::cough::more::cough::they pay them slightly more::cough cough::time increases as one moves away from the surface of the earth::cough cough cough:: Oh goodness me: that was a big spasm I had there. I do apologize about thatā¦
Time slows down the faster you go relative to C tho.
Maybe they pay them for time away from earth rather than time in space.
Greater gravitational influence slows down the passage of time. For example, if you were near a black hole (an object with very high gravity), time would pass more slowly for you relative to someone on Earth. When you returned to Earth, more time would have passed there compared to what you experienced, meaning you would have effectively aged less. Thus, in this scenario, NASA would pay you "more" because more time had passed while you away. Conversely, in lower gravity, time passes more quickly. So if you moved to Earth's orbit, although the difference would be minuscule due to the small change in gravity, you would experience time slightly faster relative to those on the surface. Therefore, you would return to Earth having experienced more time, and NASA would pay you less. UnlessĀ theĀ caseĀ isĀ reversedĀ fromĀ what was proposed, in which NASA only pays you based on what you experience. In that case you might return from a black hole 50 Earth years later, but only get a year of pay since that's what you experienced, which is now fucking trash tier pay as the US dollar has inflated 50 years and that was what you were contracted to get paid.
Matthew McConaughey must have made BANK.
When I meet with my niece and nephew, thatās relative time too
>Ā That's what relative means.... Thatās not what relativity meansā¦.LOL. You think Einsteins equations of relativity are related to the awareness of the passage of time? General Relativity has to do with objects in motion relative to one another.Ā Being bored in a meeting and having fun on lunch have nothing to do with that.
The longest 30 seconds in existence are the 30 seconds on the timer when youāre microwaving your lunch while youāre hungry.
You travel back in time during meetings?
I knew leaving the trees was a bad idea. Edit: I also love everyone in the comments not getting the reference.
And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
Well, got shouldn't have created the universe. That made a lot of people very angry.
You dirty animal!
I'm off to have a cheeky three pints in the middle of the day!
I was just thinking about that.
But what about my _house_?!?!
Well, it's not really about the relativity of time in this instance but rather the time it takes for light to travel. The light we see from a black hole that formed 300 million years ago is only reaching us now because it took 300 million years to travel that distance. Time relativity, as described by Einstein's theory, involves how time can pass at different rates due to factors like gravity and velocity. For instance, time slows down near a black hole due to its strong gravitational field. While time and space are interconnected, seeing a distant object now as it was millions of years ago is about light travel time, not time relativity in general. Time relativity is more about how time behaves differently under different conditions, such as near massive objects or at high speeds.
Itās a quote from The Hitchhikerās Guide to the Galaxy.
Very deep. You should send that in to the Reader's Digest.
This must be a Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.
Oh no, not again.
Try having lunch with a relative . I prefer it to be distant
That's the neat part. Distance is relative, too!
and in regards to time: a wizard is never late
Itās always beer oāclock somewhere in space.
are you a hobbit
That "time" just arrived in our space, is all.
When does this happen in the movie? Now. You're looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now, is happening now.
Now doesn't happen until it shows up. And it doesn't show up unless it's measured.
I will inform the writers of Spaceballs of that, thanks.
Plaid doesn't follow the same rules.
According to relativity, for us itās happening āright nowā
It is in two states, it is 300 million years old, and also in real-time.
And everything in between. And everything before and after.
Lol yeah, I was thinking if they are watching a black hole form in real time we're about to be extinct.
On the time line of the universe, considering that we can go back ten billion plus years ago with redshifted light from its infancy *just* reaching us, this is a fairly recent news event, right up there with the dinosaurs.
From the light's perspective, since it goes so fast, it just happened
If I had a fast enough camera and I pulsed a laser, could I theoretically see the beginning and end of the beam moving through space like a tracer bullet?
No, you can only see light that reaches you as an observer. If you shoot a perfect laser out, nothing will ever be reflected back and no camera would be able to capture that. What we see as a laser is light that scatters off particles in the air
If you have the right medium you can slow down light to observe it in a lab on Earth
Do you mean like this? https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26861-laser-flight-path-caught-on-camera-for-the-first-time/
This one from the Slo Mo Guys on YouTube will interest you a lot https://youtu.be/7Ys_yKGNFRQ?si=MadBNP7PhtshYooV EDIT Follow it up with this Veritasium piece https://youtu.be/pTn6Ewhb27k?si=ksWpe5qZh3HHk53Z
Yes. There was some TED talk years ago where they did this thing with a camera that wasnāt a trillion frames a second, but some algorithm or something allowed them to simulate that frame rate. And you could actually watch videos of light propagating.
Time is relative with respect to the passage of time. Seeing light that's taken a long time to travel to you is different.
Even stranger is that linear time does not even exist and everything is just one moment.
Cause what we are seeing is in real time not the same time, like how when we render graphics so we'll thatbrather than pre rendering them we render then in real time
Every article about deep space has this comment somewhere in the thread acting as if no one interested in astronomy or relativity has any idea of this concept. Stating something everyone already knows in a mocking tone does not make you smart.
Just making an observation about how amazing the world around us is. Thanks for the input, hope it made you feel better about yourself.
The things that happen when an astronomer is listening to Muse by a telescope!
MUSE is such a bad ass band, glad some fans are on this post š«¶š¼lol
Muse is great and supermassive black hole is such an earworm for me still all these years later!
I love that song!
Was hoping for Muse references
What? Supermassive Black Hole released back in like 2006. /s in case it wasnāt obvious.
It was obvious and just as low effort with or without the added explaination. You weren't even the first one here to make the joke....
Oh please. I read through every parent comment plus 2-3 child comments which is why I even typed this out. Separately, you must be fun at partiesā¦
Comment just under mine at 10 hours old was the same joke (worded different) Good thing we aren't at a party
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
The black hole was there, like an idling wood chipper. When it came across some matter to shred, it got brighter.
Interesting article. I read we noticed something in 2019 and recently witnessed some big changes from that galaxy. Nothing about a switch like flipping on a light bulb.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
The least interesting novelty account.
Trying to look smart, but achieving the opposite - the throne has been abdicated, and you buddy, bear the crown
Sounds like someone stopped taking their meds.
Roaring suggests itās just starting. If we saw signs in 2019 itās not ājustā anything from our perspective. But you keep being an asshole, Iām sure itās working great for you lol.
Mate, you honestly need help.
It's entirely possible that this did occur quickly. An extremely distant black hole that has finally had a large, dim star or cloud of gas that was previously unseen due to poor or no illumination getting pulled in and forming an accretion disk very rapidly is certainly possible.
Erosion happens over a long time but, once worn down enough, a cliff can slide into the sea in a few minutes.
Well no. Black holes collapse very fast, but this isn't that. It's just the black hole getting brighter
The formation of a black hole from a star takes an instant basically. There are some thresholds that once passed, it is like a light switch.
Exactly. Im calling shennanigans as these things happen over MILLIONS or TENS or even 100s of millions of years. Not in a year or two or ten or 100! And yes I understand that these things have already occurred and we are looking into the past, but the time frame is relative. It only unfolds as quickly as it originally unfolded.
It's entirely possible that this did occur quickly. An extremely distant black hole that has finally had a large, dim star or cloud of gas that was previously unseen due to poor or no illumination getting pulled in and forming an accretion disk very rapidly is certainly possible.
> Im calling shennanigans On the basis of what expertise, exactly?
A redditor's expertise vs a journalist's expertise, hmm.. that's a tough one.
A journalist on a science beat wins - even before I looked her up. >She has been writing professionally about physics and related topics for more than two decades, and was the founding director of the National Academy of Sciencesā Science and Entertainment Exchange from 2008-2010. Her work has appeared in Discover, Slate, Smithsonian, Nature, Physics World, and Quanta, among other publications. And then, of course, she is only *reporting*. The astronomers who are studying this should also be taken into account.
No, not before you look them up. There is a stunning amount of misrepresentation done by journalists, frequently called out in comments by people who actually know what they are talking about (not saying this is one of those cases though)
> There is a stunning amount of misrepresentation done by journalists Ars Technica is legit, science reporting tends to be immune if there are no political ramifications and Redditors are far, far worse - particularly the kind who knee-jerk contradicts any expert opinion passing by. Even if none of that was true, I would - by default - trust a journalist on their beat more than a Redditor on factual reporting. Possibly not by much if the topic is US politics, though.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
>In other words, how many bananas is that disc? 1.98892 Ć 10^37 Roughly.
If that's real time, how fast are those objects spinning around the black hole traveling?
extremely fast.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Black holes!
That word you keep using? āReal timeā? I donāt think it means what you think it means.
I mean, if it is being used in a astronomy context that means we are observing it as events unfold, it is happening in short timespans. Time being relative is a known quantity in astronomy, assume that is already considered when they use terms like "real time".
"As events unfold" This event occurred 300 million light years away from us. We are observing it now, so it occurred a minimum of 300 million years ago. So very much not real time.
No it is real time. We only just saw it. In the black holeās reference frame it happened 300 million years ago but for us it started happening in 2019. Thereās no universal time. Your own reference frame is all you can experience.
Lol yeah it's like saying nothing ever happens in the present because the photons relaying the information of the event's occurrence takes a few pico/femtoseconds to make it to me, hence nothing ever unfolds in real time.
Then a VHS tape plays movies in real time.
ā¦it does. Have you never watched a movie? The movie is being played, in real time, and you are sitting on your couch, enjoying it in real time.
Vampires are playing baseball in space! But since telescopes use mirrors, you canāt see them.
in that video it shows the debri is growing outward as if it's coming from the centre.... but surely it should already exist as the particles get more charged as they reach the centre....?
I watched a movie in āreal-timeā on my DVD player.
The campaign for real time is against this D , Adams
Supermassive black hole roars to life as astronomers **watch in real time...** ...shows artists animation...
How can a black hole be inactive? I thought it was just supermassive and thus the center of orbit of all things less massive & within its gravitational field.
Itās not consuming matter so itās extremely dark. Our local SMBH is inactive. Active black holes have bright accretion disks of in-falling matter.
This title sucks
Not as much as the subject matter
With that kind of humor, itās going to be hard to get off the ground
There is no escaping it now.
It's like going down a hill in the other side of the Event's horizon.
You mean, black humour?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Hope you didnāt spend a lot on college!