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First images from Euclid are in

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Re: First images from Euclid are in

#241

Post by km144 »

wayoverthecloud wrote: post #55
neom wrote: post #10

Some of that zooming in made me feel pretty damn uncomfortable. It really is f'ing massive out there huh. Makes me wonder what this is all about, I'm sure it's something, I wonder what. :)

I think that too. That it's surely meant to be something. But sometimes I think what does "meaning" even mean? Does universe really have any "meaning", the term that humans invented and that even they are unsure of? Then, I think it's a big randomness, a random accident, a big joke, just happening with nothing to make sense of.

I don't think the universe can have "meaning" in the human sense, because any potential "meaning" is outside of our field of observation or understanding. If something indeed created the universe or some definitive sequence of events spurred it into existence, I think that would constitute "meaning" enough for humans to be satisfied. But there is almost certainly not way to observe that fact because it is outside of the realm of our possible experiences.

But even then, if we knew what caused the universe to exist, we would then be looking at the cause of the universe and wondering what caused that cause to exist. And so I think we'd still be left wondering why anything exists at all at the end of the day.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#242

Post by bbor »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #8
bbor wrote: post #3

Really impressive work, thanks for sharing. The video, that is -- the astronomy is indistinguishable from magic and thus way beyond the reach of words like "impressive", obviously. I do find it a little funny that physics is in such a jam that "look at more stuff" is an important next step, but godspeed nonetheless. ETA: For those who love space but are similarly OOTL on the specifics of modern missions: this is from…

I agree wholeheartedly with all of your sentiments, but I don't think that Kant discovered galaxies or had much interest in them. That honor goes to Messier or Hubble, I believe.

That’s why I love this fun fact so much :) He spent a good deal of his life on natural science before turning to philosophy, not unlike Newton and Liebniz — he just happened to be way better at philosophy than science. It doesn’t help that Newton’s plan was alchemy-based, ofc.

Anyway, from Kant’s Wikipedia:

  In the Universal Natural History, Kant laid out the nebular hypothesis, in which he deduced that the Solar System had formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula. Kant also correctly deduced that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he theorized formed from a much larger spinning gas cloud. He further suggested that other distant "nebulae" might be other galaxies. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy, for the first time extending it beyond the solar system to galactic and intergalactic realms. From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on the sciences throughout his life

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#243

Post by IAmGraydon »

elteto wrote: post #209
valval wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

How arrogant and silly to look at these incredible pictures and think “Yep, this was all made for ME. I am the center of the universe!”.

How arrogant for anyone to look at these incredible pictures and think they know ANYTHING at all. We may be the center of it all, we may not, this may be a massive simulation, or a massive random accident. The only correct answer is to admit we know nothing. Humans are so fixated on knowing everything.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#244

Post by DrBazza »

kibwen wrote: post #240

What proportion of the stars in this survey have been given names (even just gibberish identifiers)? Are there too many for even astronomers to care to bother cataloguing?

Most Milky Way stars have been catalogued (to some luminosity/visibility). Wikipedia to the rescue (almost...): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_catalogue#Gaia_catalogues

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#245

Post by 1970-01-01 »

neom wrote: post #10

Some of that zooming in made me feel pretty damn uncomfortable. It really is f'ing massive out there huh. Makes me wonder what this is all about, I'm sure it's something, I wonder what. :)

The actual problem is that we were made early enough to begin to understand the full scale of it, but we're still not mature enough to go out there and explore it. Therefore, you can reason that now is the right time to get behind anything that pushes us beyond the Earth.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#247

Post by SoftTalker »

gwd wrote: post #186
SoftTalker wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are all wondering the same thing. Distances are so vast that the overwhelming probablity is that we'll just never notice each other.

How long did it take modern humans to completely colonize Earth, such that there are few places you can go on Earth and not meet any humans? Less than 10k years for sure. If we become a space-faring civilization, how long will it take us to colonize the galaxy, such that there are few places you can go and not find evidence of humans around? Not more than a million years or so. So if intelligent life -- capable of be…

> how long will it take us to colonize the galaxy

The Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across. So at least that long assuming we can ever attain near-light-speed travel (unlikely). And due to cosmic inflation, many other galaxies are receeding at faster than light speed, so we could never get there.

There could be a lot of intelligent life (as intelligent as us, maybe more so) that can never realistically travel beyond their local star systems, and we'd never notice them.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#248

Post by bbor »

kibwen wrote: post #240

What proportion of the stars in this survey have been given names (even just gibberish identifiers)? Are there too many for even astronomers to care to bother cataloguing?

As another comment says we have a naming system for the Milky Way, but I believe the point of looking above and below the Milky Way is to explicitly find galaxies (/intergalactic forms), not stars. There’s commentary on stuff like supermassive black holes at the center of other galaxies, but AFAIK as an amateur, it’s not feasible to study individual stars in other galaxies, so we have no need to name the vast majority of them.

It’s basically impossible to grasp what looking at a hundred thousand galaxies means, and that’s just a small section. It’s literally beyond human comprehension.

  In October 2016, deep-field images from the Hubble Space Telescope suggested that there are about 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, or about 10 times more galaxies than previously suggested, according to the journal Nature. In an email with Live Science, lead author Christopher Conselice, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, said there were about 100 million stars in the average galaxy.
Which comes out around 10^24, and even that’s “likely an underestimation”. The earth’s surface area is 10^8 km^2, so naming all the stars would be like naming every spot in an imaginary grid of 0.01mm^2 (!!!) squares covering the whole earth.

Sorry for the rant, I don’t get to do any dimensional analysis in my work and miss it from HS chemistry, lol. This kinda stuff makes me want to be a flat earther…

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#249

Post by bane »

neom wrote: post #10

Some of that zooming in made me feel pretty damn uncomfortable. It really is f'ing massive out there huh. Makes me wonder what this is all about, I'm sure it's something, I wonder what. :)

There's plenty of space out in space!

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#250

Post by wongarsu »

gwd wrote: post #186
SoftTalker wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are all wondering the same thing. Distances are so vast that the overwhelming probablity is that we'll just never notice each other.

How long did it take modern humans to completely colonize Earth, such that there are few places you can go on Earth and not meet any humans? Less than 10k years for sure. If we become a space-faring civilization, how long will it take us to colonize the galaxy, such that there are few places you can go and not find evidence of humans around? Not more than a million years or so. So if intelligent life -- capable of be…

Earth has had lifeforms for about 90% of its existence. Earth has existed for 33% of the age of the universe. The time it took organisms from Earth from the earliest lifeforms to discovering space travel amounts to 30% of all time was available in this universe.

Sure, it's easy to imagine someone doing it a million years faster than us. But at the same time it's very likely we are just early to the party.

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