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Posts tagged cosmology.
Wright’s Celestial Map of the Universe, 1742
aka
A synopsis of the universe, or, the visible world epitomiz’d / by Thomas Wright of Durham.
{ this }, pieced together.
Also, if you want the ultra-high-res version that might crash/stall your shit (it’s 10k px tall, lossless jpg), that’s { here. } YW.
Pas notre lune.
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The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and its two satellites, M32 and NGC 205, sketched by Jeff Corder using a 6-inch reflector at 30x, July 7, 1973.
David J. Eicher library
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Life drawing.
One of the great challenges of contemporary science is to trace the mix of simplicity and complexity, regularity and randomness, order and disorder up the ladder from elementary particle physics and cosmology to the realm of complex adaptive systems.
Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar, 119-120
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{ How do “yin” & “yang” conditions across levels of science produce life as we know it? }
I’m sure many avid astro fans out there are used to seeing pretty pictures of galaxies. You know the type. They’re usually coloured, dynamic and absolutely gorgeous. We have a few of these (usually) Hubble pictures on the wall in the office. I see them reblogged around on tumblr all the time because they are just so striking and can make you feel giddy. But these images are sometimes art over science, with arbitrary false colours, touch-ups and the like. Those galaxies are awesome in their own right, but they’re not what I work with.
Instead I’m dealing with images of distant galaxies. Not exactly Hubble Deep Field, but light from these galaxies can be millions and often billions of years old. Here’s an example of real data I’m working with from the HerMES collaboration (from the public data-set) taken with the Herschel Space Telescope. These are far-infrared images, rather than Hubble’s near-infrared/optical pictures, so the light that Herschel sees is invisible to humans.
As you can see, there are no colours! This is standard. We work with images black-on-white rather than how space really looks, with colour-on-black, as the data files these pictures are stored in represent no light at a pixel as zero and increase the number with brightness. The file-viewer I’m using here, Aladin, rescales the image to get the full grey-scale range.
So here’s some fun statistics. This box is 1.74 square degrees, representing a tiny 0.004% of the sky. In this box, at this resolution and at this wavelength there are roughly a thousand galaxies that we can pick out against the background noise with confidence (5-sigma certainty). There are loads of them hiding in the background, though. These galaxies are only a few pixels large on the image and the vast majority will never have an official name or pretty posters of them on tumblr because they’re just so distant and hard to image. So go ahead, pick one as your own and name it! You might as well!
Thanks for reading, and of course, a big hello to you new people. My ask box is always open :)
(PS, for those interested, this is part of the Lockman-SWIRE field in Herschel’s SPIRE instrument’s 250µm band. It’s part of the Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey’s (HerMES) first data-release (DR1), released earlier this month. It and other fields can be found here. Read more about HerMES here.)
Cosmism ›
see also: { Is God an Alien Mathematician? }
HUGO DE GARIS: I defined these two terms rather succinctly in the { kurzweilai.net essay } so I’ll just quote those definitions here. Deism is “the belief that there is a ‘deity’ i.e. a creator of the universe, a grand designer, a cosmic architect, that conceived and built our universe.” Cosmism is the “ideology in favor of humanity building artilects this century (despite the risk that advanced artilects may decide to wipe out humanity as a pest).”
I think de Garis ignores a crucial point: there had to be an origin universe, a beginning somewhere. If we assume that artilects created the universe/s, then we must also assume there had to be an original ‘artilect.’ Who made the artilect? This goes unexplained.
…Also why the assumption that future AI will destroy us like ants? If they are indeed more complex than us (and possibly sentient), then I think they would have a more complicated reason to kill us all than irritation.
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OS:
The assumption about being destroyed by our creations is not necessarily de Garis’s so much as his [somewhat satirical?] response to a wide-spread fear that we see reflected/purveyed in { pop culture }.
For a Cosmist, it’s not really an issue — partially because we don’t buy into the whole Armageddon-by-cyborg-menace thing and partially because, upon comprehending the big picture of the Universe (even at the scale we know it now: from the quantum to the intergalactic cosmos or perhaps the multi-verse), it’s hard to care so much about Humans as they are in this moment. We’re open to changing the human, to becoming trans- and eventually post-human, even if it means this race as we know it ceases to exist. [Maybe that sounds scary & needs explaining, but it’s not something I want to go further into right now.]
To the point about the “artilect” — in some sense, yes, it’s unexplained. However, that term means to refer to a conscious something that would eventually come about, either from us or from another “IGUS” (information gathering and utilizing systems — Murray Gell-Mann). An artilect and the “first creator” (“God”) could be totally different, especially if the first creator was not so much an entity as a set of conditions (/laws).
Besides that, I disagree that “there had to be a beginning”. In so far as we’re able to understand, yes it seems that way, but a series of infinite loops is also possible — even if that thought gives us a very large headache. We don’t know about that (yet?).
That considered, it’s likely that de Garis is ignoring all that purposely, for the sake of entertaining/introducing a new thought without engaging in a (at this point) useless conversation about a genesis.
I was just going to add this, but see it was already done so above. In my own words:
Most people assume there has to be a beginning because of our immediate experiences with cause and effect. Although evidence points to an event like the ‘big bang’ which led to the structures we now know as the universe, we aren’t certain of it yet, and even if we are, there could have been something unimaginable before space-time, or there could simply be more space-time before the big bang (a la Hawking’s big-crunch concept). Well I don’t remember if it’s his concept, but that’s where I last read about it.
I kind of enjoy the mindfuck of no beginning. Just sayin.
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Yes, good addition!
Also the { Big Bounce }: (you have to lol at those names)
a theoretical scientific model of the formation of the known universe. It is implied by the cyclic model or oscillatory universe interpretation of the Big Bang where the first cosmological event was the result of the collapse of a previous universe.
Hawking does not consider the Big Crunch to be very plausible. He and other scholars of the community more so invest in the theory that galaxies will drift so far away from each other their light can no longer be seen. Consequently, all hydrogen will eventually be used up within stars, and the universe will grow dark and no such cycle will take place. Galaxies are continuing to move further away from each other with increasing speed, so this is the logical conclusion many of the scientific community have reached.
I choose to believe there is a continuing cycle however, even if the scope is far greater than we can comprehend. Because of the movement of galaxies, a universal beginning is appropriate. Due to the cyclical nature of all things on Earth and in space, it would also be appropriate there may be a grander cycle at hand even if all light dwindles and returns to darkness; matter and energy can change from one into the other after all, so there may be hope in that fact. We may truly be a universe within universe, created by artilects or within an unseen cycle that begins anew in darkness. It is my theory that perhaps galaxies do not drift apart because of dark energy but because they are drawn to something else beyond our knowledge. In any case, I think what is most important is that we keep observing and hypothesizing, and perhaps artilects will create and embody universes after all. Thanks for the read, OS.
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OS:
Thanks for adding this! Great to have some dialogue.
& That reminds me; apparently the dark matter theory may be on the way out, according to some recent research from Chile: { Serious Blow to Dark Matter Theories? }
Also, I Googled around a bit, but could you provide a source for Stephen Hawking recalling the Big Crunch idea? Curious to learn more about that.
Thanks for the article! Dark matter and dark energy are perplexing subjects indeed, and quiet frankly, I never understood why dark energy is hypothesized to pull galaxies away from each other while not pulling galaxies themselves apart. I suppose dark matter prevents that. While dark matter is difficult to define, detect and map, dark energy is even more enigmatic. The concept of dark energy as a sort of selective anti-gravity eludes me.
As for Hawking’s statement, it was on his narrated “Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking” television program that aired on the Discovery channel. It is also available on Netflix. In the final episode, he covers a brief history of everything and naturally finishes with how the universe will likely end. He discusses the Big Crunch as well as, he believes, the more likely possibility of galaxies drifting into darkness. The “dark end” hypothesis was also discussed by Michio Kaku and others on the “How the Universe Works” television program as a plausible scenario.
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OS:
To the point about galaxies — I’m not sure, but just looking into it briefly on Wiki { Dark Energy: Nature [of] } I’d assume this part has to do with it:
Dark energy can only have such a profound effect on the universe, making up 74% of universal density, because it uniformly fills otherwise empty space.
This may not be right at all, but it makes sense that it would effect the space between galaxies more, since that’s where most of it is, as opposed to within galaxies where there’s “positive” matter taking up more room.
& Thanks! Will be Netflix-ing that soon.
Astronomers discover complex organic matter in the universe.
Organic compounds of unexpected complexity exist throughout the universe, Prof. Sun Kwok and Dr. Yong Zhang of the University of Hong Kong have discovered, suggesting that complex organic compounds can be synthesized in space even when no life forms are present.
The organic substance they found contains a mixture of aromatic (ring-like) and aliphatic (chain-like) components that are so complex, their chemical structures resemble those of coal and petroleum. Since coal and oil are remnants of ancient life, this type of organic matter was thought to arise only from living organisms.
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via { Kurzweil AI }
NETWORKS.
…a thing I’d like to research/work on, extensively.
An interest was sparked when I read about { this study } on the synchronization of disordered vs ordered networks — although the best I can do at this point in time is speculate, I’m curious about the non-obvious applications of a deeper understanding of the functioning of networks, generally…
By non-obvious, I mean those things that cannot be found through the kind of approach that aims to generate specific outcomes, which is usually the kind of setting where that expertise is applied. Jobs & products. It can’t be there — this has to be experimental & free.
But there should be anchors. It doesn’t help to forge superficial connections between things that may be entirely different on imperceptible levels. “Atoms are not things,” said Heisenberg. But non-things form networks according to some order that allows them to work, to be and grow, as if they had a goal to do that. Networks have always been, and will always be. What would it mean, to be able to harness network growth, to have the ability to mold them in more sophisticated ways than we can, now?
And what about the { brain }, { dark matter }, { the internet }, and { fungi }?
Image: Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net
![Planets Could Orbit Singularities Inside Black Holes
“Advanced civilizations may live safely inside the supermassive black holes in the galactic nuclei without being visible from the outside,” [says Vyacheslav Dokuchaev — a cosmologist at the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow]
read more at MIT’s { Technology Review }](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_luifvmzIWB1qa3q7lo1_500.png)
Planets Could Orbit Singularities Inside Black Holes
“Advanced civilizations may live safely inside the supermassive black holes in the galactic nuclei without being visible from the outside,” [says Vyacheslav Dokuchaev — a cosmologist at the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow]
read more at MIT’s { Technology Review }
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a young planetary nebula known (rather curiously) as the Boomerang Nebula. It is in the constellation of Centaurus, 5000 light-years from Earth. Planetary nebulae form around a bright, central star when it expels gas in the last stages of its life.
The Boomerang Nebula is one of the Universe’s peculiar places. In 1995, using the 15-metre Swedish ESO Submillimetre Telescope in Chile, astronomers Sahai and Nyman revealed that it is the coldest place in the Universe found so far. With a temperature of -272C, it is only 1 degree warmer than absolute zero (the lowest limit for all temperatures). Even the -270C background glow from the Big Bang is warmer than this nebula. It is the only object found so far that has a temperature lower than the background radiation.
Keith Taylor and Mike Scarrott called it the Boomerang Nebula in 1980 after observing it with a large ground-based telescope in Australia. Unable to see the detail that only Hubble can reveal, the astronomers saw merely a slight asymmetry in the nebula’s lobes suggesting a curved shape like a boomerang. The high-resolution Hubble images indicate that ‘the Bow tie Nebula’ would perhaps have been a better name.
The general bow-tie shape of the Boomerang appears to have been created by a very fierce 500 000 kilometre-per-hour wind blowing ultracold gas away from the dying central star. The star has been losing as much as one-thousandth of a solar mass of material per year for 1500 years. This is 10-100 times more than in other similar objects. The rapid expansion of the nebula has enabled it to become the coldest known region in the Universe.
The image was exposed for 1000 seconds through a green-yellow filter. The light in the image comes from starlight from the central star reflected by dust particles.
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Bow tie nebula? No, that’s hardly better than Boomerang.
I vote for “Hourglass Nebula”
text via { Hubble }
Formation of Structure in the Universe
Credit&Source: Jim Brau, Department of Physics, University of Oregon, The Early Universe, Toward the Beginning of Time
