Growing evidence that the universe is connected by giant structures (2019)

[hinkley]

There's a theory out there that our universe is a pocket universe inside of a supermassive black hole. My relativistic gravity is pretty rusty and was shaky to begin with. If that theory isn't pure fantasy, and we were a pocket universe, and large masses were spinning above the event horizon, we'd experience forces from those objects, right?

I'm still kinda fond of the Flatland theory myself. Us poor 4 dimensional beings can't figure out how to build tools that can take 5 dimensional measurements, so we see weird behavior we can't explain.

[Already__Taken]

What if our sense of scale is off and the universe isn't curved we're just orbiting a black hole 10x the mass of the visible universe. It's not expanding that's us travelling through the gravity well at 99% the speed of light relative to it.

[rb808]

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/4/100409-black-.... Personally I always preferred the theory that galaxies were just atoms in a much larger world.

[jules]

I've always wondered about the relationship between the future observable universe and black holes. Since space is expanding, far away objects that we now see will eventually move away from us faster than the speed of light so there would be no way to get at them any more. This seems similar to dropping yourself in a black hole: when you cross the event horizon you won't be able to get back to the objects outside of the black hole, unless they're dropping into the black hole too. Also, the bigger the black hole you drop yourself into, the less you'll feel it because the tidal forces become smaller. I wonder what you would see if our galaxy and surrounding galaxies were dropping into a super big black hole. Would the black hole take up more than 50% of the celestial sphere? Would everything then be moving away from us at an accelerating rate?

[koalala]

If string theory is correct, there are a number of higher dimensions, the existence of which would influence gravity at short distances. The idea is that some gravity leaks away to the other dimensions. This is a function of distance, so at short distances less gravity has leaked, and gravity should be stronger. Efforts to find this effect haven't turned anything up yet, though.

[agumonkey]

I think you have a point

[0xAF]

OT: That reminds me of the great album by Yello, named Pocket Universe. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_Universe

[mirimir]

I vaguely recall that the observable universe looks a lot like foam. And even more vaguely, that maybe this reflects inflationary expansion of random fluctuations in the early universe.

So maybe this apparent connectivity over implausible scales just reflects the fact that stuff used to be much closer together.

Edit: There's a great sequence on inflation in Takashi Miike's "God's Puzzle".

[K0SM0S]

We used to think so, yes. But our telescopes have improved a lot since then, and we're now able to see with much more detail, our 3D positioning is better too.

We've recently observed that the universe, at the largest scales of what's observable to us, looks like this: https://i.stack.imgur.com/lFnDf.jpg

More picture and explanations on this short SE thread: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/198138/is-most-o...

I'll let you ponder how much resemblance this bears to other kinds of structures...

[henearkr]

This is exactly what I thought. Sorry to not be able to comment more usefuly... I was looking for a comment already stating my idea before writing it down and i found it here.

[dvirsky]

The title (not the text, though) sounds a bit like the premise of The Flow from John Scalzi's The Collapsing Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collapsing_Empire

[ThomPete]

Any good?

[crorella]

I was thinking the same!

[corporate_shi11]

Is this really that surprising? I thought that the CMB distribution of matter displays a proto-structure that matches with what we observe today, meaning the large scale structure and congruent behavior we observe is just the result of the initial distribution and motion of matter in the early universe, rather than some mysterious force or effect we have yet to explain.

[colordrops]

Or, it doesn't require mysterious force or effect - it could just be an emergent property of how matter interacts. For instance, basic rules of atomic forces lead to complex behavior in the aggregate, such as life, foam, planets, etc. Not sure why this wouldn't apply to universal size structure as well.

[mclightning]

so, kind of like a "cosmic inertia"? that would explain it. although I find this problematic explanation in the sense, every force in the universe stems from a shared origin all the way down to big bang. how do we draw the line between what is emergent and what is inherent? inherent being the cosmic inertia.

edit: come to think of it, nothing is inherent about the universe except for anything before the big bang; and there we go into the realm of quantum foam, string theory, if I am not mistaken.

edit: I went ahead and wrote a thought piece on this; https://medium.com/@suphievrakzade/abstraction-layers-for-th...

[varjag]

I don't know, to me it's fairly surprising.

[_bxg1]

Is there no chance these are coincidences? It gives me "Bible Code" vibes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_code#Criticism

"information theory does not prohibit "noise" from appearing to be sometimes meaningful"

[thaumaturgy]

Indeed, or the result of some specific starting conditions in the early universe.

But I must assume that these cosmologists have already considered and discarded that. I'd just like to be able to read more about why that guess doesn't fit what they're observing.

[hateful]

All hail his noodly appendage.

[dkersten]

String theorists got it wrong: the universe isn’t made up of small vibrating strings, it’s made up of small vibrating noodles.

[joe_the_user]

One thought that occurs to me is that large-scale structures like sheets and black holes with parallel axes of rotation could be the result large directional explosions soon after the big bang rather than the result of a large force acting now.

[s1artibartfast]

I dont even think you need the explosion.

You can imagine two gas sheets sliding along eachother. All of the vortices formed between them will spin in the same plane.

You can imagine similar trends for interacting spheres and other geometries.

[mclightning]

I think we should be careful when explaining things in universe by tying it all the way back to big bang. I was discussing about this in another comment below. Then I wrote a thought piece about it here; https://medium.com/@suphievrakzade/abstraction-layers-for-th...

[simonh]

There would have to be objects or structures already there to explode. That just doesn't fit with current models.

This may well point to there being more structure or asymmetry in the very early universe, but things that can explode being present there is a pretty extreme version of that.

[Ididntdothis]

Where would these directional explosions come from?

[arthens]

That was my first thought too, but my knowledge on the topic is tiny and I was hoping the article would explain why that wasn't possible.

[tiku]

Evidence? Observations from our point of view (including readings from space, still fairly close, on scale) are limited to our current position etc. So how can we really tell if it's just not curvature of space and blackholes that distort our point of view and readings? Interesting anyhow, but perhaps a bit soon.

[ieatmyownpoop]

All i know is: I want stargate to be a thing

[outworlder]

Stargate Universe in this case, as Destiny was launched to collect data all across the universe, because the Ancients had identified a pattern in the structure of the universe...

[michaelsbradley]

Plasma filaments and other plasma structures can manifest long-range attractive and repulsive electromagnetic forces proportional to d^-1 instead of d^-2. So if those forces are operative at galactic and intergalactic scales (between plasma structures) and we’re not fully taking them into account, then we may be overlooking the most powerful organizing mechanism in the universe.

[Edward9]

It seems that periodically there is evidence showing that the universe is this or that and yet nothing is and it will never be concrete because it's impossible to find the root of the universe. I see it as a more philosophical question. I think we should be more focused on exploring the universe, not understanding it.

[colordrops]

We are able to explore the universe because of out attempts to understand it.

[novaRom]

A long-term motion of large structures of dark matter may be one explanation. We still don't know too much about dark matter except it plays central role in building the cosmic web.

I hope James Webb Space Telescope will not fail to operate and its launch will not be delayed again (the project is 25 years old).

[RenRav]

What kind of movement is it?

Calling it a web of filaments doesn't paint a clear picture as to the movement itself.

Assuming it's synchronized, I think of child objects moving in sync with some kind of parent structure. That sounds ridiculous though.

[simonh]

I don't understand why you think it's ridiculous for child objects, which formed within a structure, to reflect characteristics of that structure.

The movements described in the article are mainly alignment and direction of axial rotation.

[jgalvez]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4pWZGBpWP0

It would be pretty amazing if all this turned out to be true ^

[brutt]

Another research about large scale structures: http://irfu.cea.fr/dipolerepeller

[ericdykstra]

This sounds a bit like Bill Gaede's Rope Hypothesis, but I'm not very well-versed in the topic to say for sure. Can anyone confirm/deny?

[cheez]

This makes sense. Our roads look like arteries. The universe is fractal. So it makes sense that there are arterial-like structures connecting galaxies.

[hyfgfh]

The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief is near!

[cmarschner]

> which is very slowly rotating in a counter-clockwise direction

What does this even mean? Would they rotate clockwise when looking from Australia?