Largest Object in the Universe Discovered 274
prostoalex writes "Quick, think of the largest object you can imagine. Whatever your imagination delivered it probably wasn't an 'enormous amoeba-like structure 200 light-years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas,' a newly found object, as USA Today reports."
This reminds me (Score:1, Interesting)
This reminds me of an interesting thought I once heard in some movie, it was something like this:
Remember (Score:5, Interesting)
Size 42 (Score:5, Interesting)
The Wall? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This reminds me (Score:1, Interesting)
That said, it could simply work on a different timescale. It seems, though, that if the lifespan of your "particles" - galaxies - is of the same order as the time it takes light to cross your fingernail, you're pretty much screwed.
What makes a 'single' structure (Score:3, Interesting)
Why 'theoretical big bang' though? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This reminds me (Score:1, Interesting)
By M.
Re:Problem with pseudo-scientists (Score:5, Interesting)
Whose thinking ISN'T limited by what they know?
Everyone has limitations, but one of the beauties of the human mind is metacognition. The phenomenon of having expert knowledge prevent one from reinterpreting contrary data is referred to as "confirmation bias" which I recently read about in a blog post by Bob Sutton [typepad.com]. Sutton is a fairly renowned consultant.
In the above post, he refers to a phrase that should be familiar to many geeks, which is "strong opinions, weakly held." This is a very good approach to the study of science. Know what you know with near certainty, but the second you come across contrary evidence be ready to let everything go.
Really, it's just the idea that no one, really, knows anything. All knowledge is contingent and what little we think we know is probably wrong somewhere.
Re:That's 200 Million, not 200 Light Years (Score:4, Interesting)
My favorite example is biological. We have no trouble viewing colonial organisms like a sponge or a coral head or a Portuguese Man-o-War as a single "object", even as a single "individual". But biologists have found that treating a hive of bees or ants (or any eusocial creatures) as a single "individual" helps greatly in understanding them. True, these individuals have a lot of physically disconnected bodies. But they are bound by effective communication systems, mostly chemical, partly visual and auditory, and they really do behave as a single colonial individual.
This mostly just illustrates that our definitions of "individual" and "object" might need a bit of work. And the best definition might vary somewhat depending on your field of study.
We know pretty well that treating the "Gaia" concept as a real individual is mostly just silly. But that's at the high extreme; a single animal such as a human certainly is an "individual" although we arose from what was originally a colonial collection of single-cell organisms 600 million years or so back. Somewhere in this continuum we find borderline cases like ants, bees, termites, and mole rats, which are borderline cases that confound our definitions.
But the universe doesn't have to file things according to our definitions. Rather, it's up to us to find concepts that work, and give them names that work.
It's likely that, for astronomers, it will turn out useful to treat this collection of galaxies and assorted other stuff as a gravitationally bound "object". Or maybe, like the recent discussion of the term "planet", astronomers might decide that this was a bad idea and will revise the terminoloy appropriately.
I think they'd have been better off calling it a "structure". But IANAA.