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."
That's 200 Million, not 200 Light Years (Score:5, Informative)
Re:That's 200 Million, not 200 Light Years (Score:2)
"Largest Object in the Universe Discovered" (Score:2)
Re:That's 200 Million, not 200 Light Years (Score:3, Funny)
Re:That's 200 Million, not 200 Light Years (Score:4, Funny)
Microsoft OS used to work on a 8Mhz machine and now will require a 4Ghz machine(4000Mhz) to run well(MS Vista.) That's only a 500x increase. The 1,000,000 time increase here makes that look like a drop in the bucket!
The universe making MS look good! Gotta love it.
Re:One of the main purposes of Vista... (Score:2)
Re:That's 200 Million, not 200 Light Years (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's 200 Million, not 200 Light Years (Score:2)
Re:That's 200 Million, not 200 Light Years (Score:2)
Re:That's 200 Million, not 200 Light Years (Score:2)
Re:That's 200 Million, not 200 Light Years (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's 200 Million, not 200 Light Years (Score:3, Informative)
Agreed. On a cosmic level we have no way of knowing if the known universe is just a small part of a larger structure. As such, all of the known universe could be "single object", so lets be serious about the way we define things, especially in physics.
In my opinion, TFA is a load of crud. An "object" is a single item. To use an astrophysics definition, it is a parcel of matter of contiguous structure bound by atomic or molecular forces (but not magnetic or gravitic) incorporating solid or liquid state mat
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.
In Slashdot units... (Score:2)
200 light years is only 197 thousand trillion London bus lengths wide, whereas 200 million light years is 197 billion trillion London bus lengths wide. That's a lot of busses!
Re:In Slashdot units... (Score:2)
Re:In Slashdot units... (Score:2)
Move over metric system, a new rule arrives: London buses. Standard rule: 1 London bus = #4 from Angel, Islington.
Re:That's 200 Million, not 200 Light Years (Score:3, Funny)
The Genius of Gene Roddenberry (Score:2)
40 years ago, Gene Roddenberry, the creator of "Star Trek", already predicted the eventual discovery of space amoeba. Check out the episode (from "Star Trek: The Original Series") titled "The Immunity Syndrome [usatoday.com]." According to the synopsis by Wikipedia, "The huge expenditure of ship's energy attra
Re:That's 200 Million, not 200 Light Years (Score:2)
Gee, Captain... (Score:5, Funny)
200 MILLION light-years wide... (Score:2)
Re:200 MILLION light-years wide... (Score:2)
Re:200 MILLION light-years wide... (Score:2)
Re:Mark parent redundant (Score:2)
200 != 200,000,000 (Score:2, Informative)
Something 200 light years across is not big (on galactic scales). TFA says the structure here is 200 million LY.
Re:200 != 200,000,000 (Score:2)
No way (Score:4, Funny)
Re:No way (Score:2)
Way! (Score:2)
Re:No way (Score:4, Funny)
ballmer.c: error: invalid application of `sizeof' to a void type
Wow, it really doesn't compare! (I'm so sorry...)
Submission is wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Also, the article is somewhat misleading itself, as the blob isn't really a homogenous structure. It's just a group of galaxies packed together more closely than other clusters. So it isn't really that much different from other parts of the Universe.
Re:Submission is wrong (Score:2)
And a galaxy is just a group of stars packed together, etc.
Re:Submission is wrong (Score:3, Funny)
You do realize that the Galatic Real Estate Agency will be sending out a team of Space Ninjas after you for trying ruin the market? Remember, in real estate, it's location, location, location!
Re:Submission is wrong (Score:3, Informative)
"A team of astronomers using the Subaru and Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea has discovered giant, three-dimensional filaments of galaxies extending across 200 million light-years of space. These filaments, which formed a mere 2 billion years after the birth of the universe, are the largest-known structures ever disc
Remember (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Wow, (Score:2)
Large Packets of Gas? (Score:2)
Then again for how far away this is, maybe it already has and we won't be able to see it for a long time. The article doesn't say how far away this is in relation to us... but it does say it's 200 million light years across.
Re:Large Packets of Gas? (Score:4, Informative)
SO if its 2000 times as big as our galaxy and we are just NOW being able to see it. Its probably REALLY REALLY far away.. I would guess!
Another note our cluster of galaxies called the Virgo cluster which containes most of the visible galaxies such as Andromeda is 100 million light years across.
Re:Large Packets of Gas? (Score:3, Informative)
Sure-- that's just what most astronomers expect happened. Remember that when we look really far away, we're also looking really far back in time, back far enough that we're starting to be able to see somethings about the universe before many of the galaxies which exist today existed
We're doomed (Score:5, Funny)
Vista??? (Score:3, Funny)
So they found Windows Vista code repository...
Largest object in the universe and full of hot gas
Large pockets of gas?..Amend the bible? (Score:3, Funny)
*ps.. i am SOOO going to hell!
Re:Large pockets of gas?..Amend the bible? (Score:2)
Couldn't resist (Score:3, Funny)
Size 42 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Size 42 (Score:2)
Re:Size 42 (Score:2)
An enormous amoeba-like structure... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:An enormous amoeba-like structure... (Score:2)
http://images.usatoday.com/tech/_photos/2006/07/27
Here's a higher resolution picture that includes the missing pieces:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Flying_Spaghett i_Monster.jpg [wikipedia.org]
The Wall? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The Wall? (Score:2, Informative)
Something Bigger (Score:2, Funny)
I know its name!!! (Score:3, Funny)
We are doomed!
Here come the "your moms" jokes (Score:3, Funny)
Space is big (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Space is big (Score:2)
Thought this was an Enormous Mutant Star Goat (Score:3, Funny)
Largest Object? (Score:3, Funny)
The star of death? (Score:2)
Guess it's time to bow to our Sith overlords before it's too late...
I sense you have lost faith in the dark side if you mod this down.
Press release (Score:5, Informative)
All Hail the FSB (Score:2)
Big stuff (Score:2)
Just an amoeba? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Just an amoeba? (Score:2)
Largest Object... (Score:3, Funny)
The Immunity Syndrome (Score:2, Funny)
What makes a 'single' structure (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What makes a 'single' structure (Score:2)
Re:What makes a 'single' structure (Score:2)
One of the major activities of astronomy is to try to observe things long enough to understand their normal fluctuations-- based on the earth's rotation and revolution around the Sun, observations made 6 months apart give one a 2AU baseline to look for parallax, which can provide relatively exact position
Obvious?!?!?!?! (Score:2, Funny)
Fixed... (Score:5, Funny)
Whoops, sorry. Forgot to zip up...
Re:Fixed... (Score:3, Funny)
We're talking about your mouth here right?
Re:Fixed... (Score:2)
"My Gog, it's Full of Farts!" (Score:2)
Oblig. question: (Score:2)
Come on /. (Score:2)
Actually... (Score:2)
Why 'theoretical big bang' though? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why 'theoretical big bang' though? (Score:2)
Standard Issue Joke, Ahoy (Score:2)
Not largest (Score:3, Funny)
It's here, now what? (Score:2)
Sure, it sounds big (Score:2)
The largest object (Score:2)
"Quick, think of the largest object you can imagine ... galaxies and large bubbles of gas...."
Michael Moore.
If this thing combines... (Score:2, Funny)
Get ready... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:This reminds me (Score:3, Funny)
Re:This reminds me (Score:2)
Oblig. Futurama response (Score:2)
Farnsworth 420: Dig it! All of you fitting in this box is, like, seriously freaked up!
Farnsworth 1: Nonsense! Why, there's a whole universe in there.
Farnsworth 420: Dude, there's a universe in all of us.
Amy 420: (puts her arms around Farnsworth 420) Right on, Professor Freaksworth!
Farnsworth 420 offers Farnsworth A a flower.
Farnsworth A: Get a job!
Wow. (Score:2)
Wow. I see MIB counts as a philosophy lesson nowadays.
Re:This reminds me (Score:2, Insightful)
Problem with pseudo-scientists (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with pseudoscientists such as yourself is that your thinking is limited by what you know.
So what if the fastest information can travel is the speed of light? If this 200-million-light year-wide amoeba is, say, a small part of the being, problems of entropy and decay may not be relevant. How long will the larger structures of such a being persist? What are the structures of such a being?
Imagine a species of "being" existing on the scale of what we call the quantum. Applying what is knowable about the world of the quantum to the world of the molecular would mean that our macro world could not exist. Such beings would say, "the ravages of quantum mechanics and particle decay and instability would not allow such beings to exist." They would be both right and wrong. The world we normally observe cannot be extrapolated from the world of the subatomic. Lucky for us, our world is an empirical fact.
Concerning the grandparent's ideas which you so cavalierly dismiss according to what you know about your sub-universe scale, those ideas are unproven and perhaps unlikely. What is not unlikely is the empirical fact that our universe is part of something whose dimensions and larger nature is UNKNOWABLE TO US
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:This reminds me (Score:4, Insightful)
I've got some stoner logic for you "Woah man, what if there was, like, this kind of person who was really smart, and like totally understood math and science concepts, but like, is totally stupid when it comes to dealing with people. Like they're just plain condescending and rude."
On the other hand, your logic for the existance of macro or micro organisms holds weight.
Re:The largest? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The largest? (Score:3, Funny)
Bonds are broken; bonds are created. Free radicals come into existence, start mucking everything up and are eventually soaked up. And life goes on, one way or another.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:2)
No but it's almost big enough to store Vista.
Re:Would that not be the universe itself? (Score:2)
"You see, the computer that runs it is an advanced one. In fact, it is more powerful than the sum total of all the computers on this planet including -and this is the tricky part- including itself." - Professor "Reg" Chronitis, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency; Douglas Adams.
(I know, this is
Re:I don't really understand (Score:2)
Just the same as you are an object, and contain other objects. You had lunch today right?