It's actually one of the things I enjoy about it. It is a reminder of just how unimportant we actually are. All of the rat races and stress and worry we endure and/or put ourselves through is ultimately for nothing. Since it doesn't matter anyways, might as well live it in the most free and self fulfilling way one can.
Whether something is important or unimportant is something that only humans, and possibly some animals, and possibly some AI, can reason about. Most of the universe does not reason, and does not think that things are important or not.
Importance is a local concept, and it can be quite relevant locally.
Yep. Plus, with the Rubin telescope online, we have a pretty high resolution and high frequency scan of the solar system where we could detect anything that could hurt us pretty far out, probably even wandering black holes.
In some sense, our small size with respect to astronomical-scale processes does not make us all that fragile, because we are also very short-lived with respect to these things.
Afraid of the impending collision of Andromeda with the Milky Way? Not to worry. Life as we know will be gone by then. Huge processes like galactic mergers are "in slow motion" relative to our every day processes due to light speed bounds. The time they take to occur is enormous because the distances involved are enormous. In a cool way, the presence and influence of an astronomical object is just as insignificant to our processes as the presence and influence of one electron, and for the same reason: enormous difference of scale. The big stuff is no more scary than the small stuff.
Reminds me of my favorite writing prompt that was so good it was it's own story too:
"It’s been publicly confirmed that our galaxy is within the open maw of a massive galaxy-eating beast. The beast can’t move faster than light, so it’ll take hundreds of millions of years for it to finally bite down. This is something that humans will just have to live with"
(I don't think you can actually tell a good story with this, it's a background detail you would put in some other story).
It kind of became a daily obsession of mine recently, the question being - how can we NOT study space and what's around us as almost the main thing? I kind of regret not going that direction when I was in my 20s.
I wonder if it's similar to how mefical doctors feel about their jobs. It's gotta turn into a bit of a routine, otherwise they will just spend time in that existential crisis and not get anything done.
> This is cool as heck, and now I’m going to go back to my computer job and try not to think about how ridiculously tiny and fragile my little life is.
There could be an alternative take here: we really lucked out that life as we know it exists at all. So we kinda won the lottery already.
Some form of life is probably quite common given the scale of entire universe, amino acids could be found in space for example coming from pre-solar times. If you understand what I just wrote you have to accept above as fact.
Now there are fuck tonne of filters we passed so far, may very well fail on next one (probably self-destruction), and we are lucky with so far stable good place for life. Given there are billions of trillions of planets, no way we are on the very top of that ridiculous number.
We may be one of the earlier civs but no way we are first neither. But how we would recognize a civilization that has say just a 1 billion years headstart? Dyson spheres are for fools ignoring dark forest stuff, not something really smart cautious beings would do. Matter holds enormous amount of energy, and there are other ways to extract it in a less obvious ways, ie black holes or probably some other ways.
Look at it this way - we are maybe building a small baby steps for one of big civilizations of universe. Still extremely primitive in all possible ways while arrogant enough to mostly not see it, but there is potential for true greatness. Otherwise we will perish, I dont see anything in between.
Another fun one. The Cosmic Calendar. [1] Imagine breaking down the history of the universe into a single year. It really offers some amazing perspective on the length of life, and what it means.
Same. As soon as I really let myself consider how vast, empty, desolate empty space is and then imagine myself floating in it with no reference and unable to tell if I am up or down or going anywhere ... I get all sorts of dread.
That being said... I'd love to if I were terminally ill yet capable enough to understand what was happening -- to be yeeted into a super super massive blackhole that was not feeding such that I would not be torn to shreds or vaporized by the accretion disk and ultimately understand what lies at the center of my now time horizon...
Same. The scales that the universe operates on (distance, time, mass/energy, etc) make the human experience so infinitely small as to be nearly nothing. Yet, here we are. Pondering our own existence.
It’s our job. It’s mundane. It’s only cool again when you step back for these kind of publications, or when you go to a conference and you see a bunch of adjacent (and importantly, completed) work. 99% of the time we look at a screen / piece of paper / whiteboard.
If something that is true scares you, you should think about it and look at it, in little bits, until it doesn’t.
Accept your fragility, be grateful for what the universe gives you, be humble about your limits and faults, and spread happiness, joy and love to the other fragile, limited beings around you. There’s your cure for existential dread.
From the abstract: “This is the lowest-mass object known to us, by two orders of magnitude, to be detected at a cosmological distance by its gravitational effect. This work demonstrates the observational feasibility of using gravitational imaging to probe the million-solar-mass regime far beyond our local Universe.”
Can someone knowledgeable weigh in: is the "dark object" here believed to be a localized blob of dark matter? A dark star or black hole? Or is "dark" being used generally to mean "not bright enough to see at this distance"?
In this context, “dark object” really does mean a localized blob of dark matter, not a black hole or a dim, normal-matter object.
The research team detected it only through its gravitational lensing effect — the way it slightly distorted the light from a more distant galaxy. There’s no emission at any wavelength (optical, infrared, or radio), and its gravitational signature matches a million-solar-mass clump of invisible mass rather than a compact point source like a black hole.
They specifically interpret it as a dark matter subhalo — one of the small, dense lumps that simulations of “cold dark matter” predict should pepper the universe’s larger halos. It’s too massive to be a single star, far too diffuse to be a stellar remnant, and not luminous enough to be a faint galaxy.
So “dark” here isn’t just shorthand for “too dim to see at this distance” — it’s used in the literal physical sense: matter that doesn’t emit or absorb light at all, detectable only via gravity.
Eventually, all the dark matter clumps into rings around galaxies, but since this one is so distant, ~10B light years, so we are seeing that clump as it was that long ago before it difused into it's ring shape we can see in the galaxies around us.
Dark in the context of astrophysics means specifically that the object/matter does not interact directly with electromagnetic radiation (eg absorb an optical/microwave/radio photon). So it is probably dark matter, but probably unlikely to be a black hole because we can typically detect a black hole's effects in an indirect manner :P
From the paper, it could be the dark-matter halo of an otherwise too faint dwarf galaxy. They state that a “more definitive statement on what type of object [it] is will require deep optical/infrared observations to detect any potential EM emission”.
Definitionally, yes. It’s inert but lenses light around it.
The paper is more about the technical achievement of detecting it, IIUC. It’s not the first dark matter inference we’ve had, and doesn’t really tell us anything new about the stuff.
It challenges warm dark matter and ultralight dark matter theories because they'd be less likely to clump into something so small. Similarly MOND would have trouble explaining a completely isolated chunk of it at this size (any baryonic matter trapped in a region this small would almost certainly emit enough light to detect).
I'm an amateur but I feel confident enough to answer -- hopefully not a mistake!
They're explicitly looking for "Dark Matter", which doesn't "interact" with normal ("baryonic") matter or electromagnetic radiation (e.g. light). So it's not a black hole for sure, as those are composed of regular ol' matter.
RE:"dark star", that's really up in the air, I'd say! AFAICT the only academic reference to that term is for normal stars influenced by dark matter[1], but kinda the whole problem here is that we don't know much about what dark matter is composed of or into. Certainly it's not going to be a star in the traditional sense as it can't emit light, but I'm not aware of any reason this object can't end up being a giant sphere.
FWIW, Wikipedia says "One of the most massive stars known is Eta Carinae, with 100–200 [solar masses]", whereas this object "has a mass that is a million times greater than that of our Sun". If we're going to use metaphors, I think "dark dwarf galaxy" might be more appropriate?
which doesn't "interact" with normal ("baryonic") matter
I think you mean it doesn't interact electromagnetically with either matter or radiation. It does interact with normal matter via gravity -- that's pretty much the strongest (only?) argument for its existence.
I'm not aware of any reason this object can't end up being a giant sphere
AIUI, most theories posit that solid spheres of dark matter are very unlikely because matter accretion is governed by electromagnetism in addition to gravity, and dark matter is not supposed to obey the former. Most models assume that dark matter is organized in gaseous clouds (halos); strictly speaking that's still a giant sphere, just not in the same way that Jupiter or the Sun or even the Oort Cloud is.
They found a statistical anomaly that they're trying to atrribute to new physics, using some novel maths. So a tiny speck of evidence towards a new theory of matter (i know nothing about astro, just my supposition)
Is this the first time this article author has seen “image” used like this? We image human anatomy the same way - sophisticated algorithms take the output of CT, ultrasound, MRI and build something we can interpret visually.
Yep, this still blows my mind, has a radius of 330 million light years, of, er, nothing (well 60 galaxies compared to what should be several thousand). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo%C3%B6tes_Void
We are surrounded by dark objects, a rock is a dark object, exoplanets are dark objects, and so are black holes. Pretty much everything but stars are dark objects. They are all dark because they don't emit light.
Here, I think they mean stuff (whatever it is) that can only be detected by gravitational lensing, and it makes sense that it has to be extremely heavy, because gravity is so weak.
I'm not a physicist but every definition of dark matter that I read says it does not interact with electromagnetic radiation hence it is invisible, and rocks are not that dark matter (wiki. NASA, etc)
If you think that's crazy, it's likely a drop in the bucket comared to the noumenonal world.
There's no reason to think that our senses encompass the vast majority of understanding everything in reality and current evidence that they, in fact, do not, via dark matter as a primary source.
I suspect our senses encompass a meaningless fraction of the noumenon.
It's our descendants. They had to travel back in time to escape entropy and find sufficient quantities of energy to sustain them, which is why they're 10 billion light years away.
I have nothing but admiration for people who can study space and not melt down into a permanent existential crisis.
This is cool as heck, and now I’m going to go back to my computer job and try not to think about how ridiculously tiny and fragile my little life is.
It's actually one of the things I enjoy about it. It is a reminder of just how unimportant we actually are. All of the rat races and stress and worry we endure and/or put ourselves through is ultimately for nothing. Since it doesn't matter anyways, might as well live it in the most free and self fulfilling way one can.
Whether something is important or unimportant is something that only humans, and possibly some animals, and possibly some AI, can reason about. Most of the universe does not reason, and does not think that things are important or not.
Importance is a local concept, and it can be quite relevant locally.
Yep. Plus, with the Rubin telescope online, we have a pretty high resolution and high frequency scan of the solar system where we could detect anything that could hurt us pretty far out, probably even wandering black holes.
In some sense, our small size with respect to astronomical-scale processes does not make us all that fragile, because we are also very short-lived with respect to these things.
Afraid of the impending collision of Andromeda with the Milky Way? Not to worry. Life as we know will be gone by then. Huge processes like galactic mergers are "in slow motion" relative to our every day processes due to light speed bounds. The time they take to occur is enormous because the distances involved are enormous. In a cool way, the presence and influence of an astronomical object is just as insignificant to our processes as the presence and influence of one electron, and for the same reason: enormous difference of scale. The big stuff is no more scary than the small stuff.
Reminds me of my favorite writing prompt that was so good it was it's own story too:
"It’s been publicly confirmed that our galaxy is within the open maw of a massive galaxy-eating beast. The beast can’t move faster than light, so it’ll take hundreds of millions of years for it to finally bite down. This is something that humans will just have to live with"
(I don't think you can actually tell a good story with this, it's a background detail you would put in some other story).
It kind of became a daily obsession of mine recently, the question being - how can we NOT study space and what's around us as almost the main thing? I kind of regret not going that direction when I was in my 20s.
I wonder if it's similar to how mefical doctors feel about their jobs. It's gotta turn into a bit of a routine, otherwise they will just spend time in that existential crisis and not get anything done.
> This is cool as heck, and now I’m going to go back to my computer job and try not to think about how ridiculously tiny and fragile my little life is.
There could be an alternative take here: we really lucked out that life as we know it exists at all. So we kinda won the lottery already.
Some form of life is probably quite common given the scale of entire universe, amino acids could be found in space for example coming from pre-solar times. If you understand what I just wrote you have to accept above as fact.
Now there are fuck tonne of filters we passed so far, may very well fail on next one (probably self-destruction), and we are lucky with so far stable good place for life. Given there are billions of trillions of planets, no way we are on the very top of that ridiculous number.
We may be one of the earlier civs but no way we are first neither. But how we would recognize a civilization that has say just a 1 billion years headstart? Dyson spheres are for fools ignoring dark forest stuff, not something really smart cautious beings would do. Matter holds enormous amount of energy, and there are other ways to extract it in a less obvious ways, ie black holes or probably some other ways.
Look at it this way - we are maybe building a small baby steps for one of big civilizations of universe. Still extremely primitive in all possible ways while arrogant enough to mostly not see it, but there is potential for true greatness. Otherwise we will perish, I dont see anything in between.
Another fun one. The Cosmic Calendar. [1] Imagine breaking down the history of the universe into a single year. It really offers some amazing perspective on the length of life, and what it means.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln8UwPd1z20
Same. As soon as I really let myself consider how vast, empty, desolate empty space is and then imagine myself floating in it with no reference and unable to tell if I am up or down or going anywhere ... I get all sorts of dread.
That being said... I'd love to if I were terminally ill yet capable enough to understand what was happening -- to be yeeted into a super super massive blackhole that was not feeding such that I would not be torn to shreds or vaporized by the accretion disk and ultimately understand what lies at the center of my now time horizon...
You're in good company with the atoms in your fingernail, I'm sure :)
Tidal forces would still shred and disfigured you horrifically well before the event horizon. The term is literally 'spagghetification'
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Same. The scales that the universe operates on (distance, time, mass/energy, etc) make the human experience so infinitely small as to be nearly nothing. Yet, here we are. Pondering our own existence.
Conversely, people who study microscopic phenomena might end up with gigantic inflated egos. "Lord of the atoms"
It’s our job. It’s mundane. It’s only cool again when you step back for these kind of publications, or when you go to a conference and you see a bunch of adjacent (and importantly, completed) work. 99% of the time we look at a screen / piece of paper / whiteboard.
If something that is true scares you, you should think about it and look at it, in little bits, until it doesn’t.
Accept your fragility, be grateful for what the universe gives you, be humble about your limits and faults, and spread happiness, joy and love to the other fragile, limited beings around you. There’s your cure for existential dread.
Actual paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-025-02651-2
From the abstract: “This is the lowest-mass object known to us, by two orders of magnitude, to be detected at a cosmological distance by its gravitational effect. This work demonstrates the observational feasibility of using gravitational imaging to probe the million-solar-mass regime far beyond our local Universe.”
And when you are trying out a new imaging method, the selection bias for "long tail weird stuff" that shows up is pretty high.
Assuming this is repeatable, it will take a while to contextualize.
Can someone knowledgeable weigh in: is the "dark object" here believed to be a localized blob of dark matter? A dark star or black hole? Or is "dark" being used generally to mean "not bright enough to see at this distance"?
In this context, “dark object” really does mean a localized blob of dark matter, not a black hole or a dim, normal-matter object.
The research team detected it only through its gravitational lensing effect — the way it slightly distorted the light from a more distant galaxy. There’s no emission at any wavelength (optical, infrared, or radio), and its gravitational signature matches a million-solar-mass clump of invisible mass rather than a compact point source like a black hole.
They specifically interpret it as a dark matter subhalo — one of the small, dense lumps that simulations of “cold dark matter” predict should pepper the universe’s larger halos. It’s too massive to be a single star, far too diffuse to be a stellar remnant, and not luminous enough to be a faint galaxy.
So “dark” here isn’t just shorthand for “too dim to see at this distance” — it’s used in the literal physical sense: matter that doesn’t emit or absorb light at all, detectable only via gravity.
Eventually, all the dark matter clumps into rings around galaxies, but since this one is so distant, ~10B light years, so we are seeing that clump as it was that long ago before it difused into it's ring shape we can see in the galaxies around us.
Why does dark matter form halos/rings around galaxies. Why isn't it attracted to the centre of the galaxy like 'normal' matter?
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Dark in the context of astrophysics means specifically that the object/matter does not interact directly with electromagnetic radiation (eg absorb an optical/microwave/radio photon). So it is probably dark matter, but probably unlikely to be a black hole because we can typically detect a black hole's effects in an indirect manner :P
From the paper, it could be the dark-matter halo of an otherwise too faint dwarf galaxy. They state that a “more definitive statement on what type of object [it] is will require deep optical/infrared observations to detect any potential EM emission”.
Definitionally, yes. It’s inert but lenses light around it.
The paper is more about the technical achievement of detecting it, IIUC. It’s not the first dark matter inference we’ve had, and doesn’t really tell us anything new about the stuff.
It challenges warm dark matter and ultralight dark matter theories because they'd be less likely to clump into something so small. Similarly MOND would have trouble explaining a completely isolated chunk of it at this size (any baryonic matter trapped in a region this small would almost certainly emit enough light to detect).
I'm an amateur but I feel confident enough to answer -- hopefully not a mistake!
They're explicitly looking for "Dark Matter", which doesn't "interact" with normal ("baryonic") matter or electromagnetic radiation (e.g. light). So it's not a black hole for sure, as those are composed of regular ol' matter.
RE:"dark star", that's really up in the air, I'd say! AFAICT the only academic reference to that term is for normal stars influenced by dark matter[1], but kinda the whole problem here is that we don't know much about what dark matter is composed of or into. Certainly it's not going to be a star in the traditional sense as it can't emit light, but I'm not aware of any reason this object can't end up being a giant sphere.
FWIW, Wikipedia says "One of the most massive stars known is Eta Carinae, with 100–200 [solar masses]", whereas this object "has a mass that is a million times greater than that of our Sun". If we're going to use metaphors, I think "dark dwarf galaxy" might be more appropriate?
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1004.1258
(I’m an astrophysics undergrad.) Black holes aren’t composed of anything, they’re just defined by their charge, spin and mass equivalent.
Dust clouds have those mass ranges. It’s not a galaxy-scale mass by any measure.
This thread has a lot of CS people being confident about physics.
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which doesn't "interact" with normal ("baryonic") matter
I think you mean it doesn't interact electromagnetically with either matter or radiation. It does interact with normal matter via gravity -- that's pretty much the strongest (only?) argument for its existence.
I'm not aware of any reason this object can't end up being a giant sphere
AIUI, most theories posit that solid spheres of dark matter are very unlikely because matter accretion is governed by electromagnetism in addition to gravity, and dark matter is not supposed to obey the former. Most models assume that dark matter is organized in gaseous clouds (halos); strictly speaking that's still a giant sphere, just not in the same way that Jupiter or the Sun or even the Oort Cloud is.
100-200 solar masses is not one of the largest known. There are many that are 1000s of times more massive than the sun.
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Or a cloaked ship?
If so it's a big one, 1M solar masses.
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EXCESSION
... and its heading right for us :P
They found a statistical anomaly that they're trying to atrribute to new physics, using some novel maths. So a tiny speck of evidence towards a new theory of matter (i know nothing about astro, just my supposition)
Is this the first time this article author has seen “image” used like this? We image human anatomy the same way - sophisticated algorithms take the output of CT, ultrasound, MRI and build something we can interpret visually.
why would you get that impression?
my read on it.
- the quotes around image in the title
- the commenter believes image is the correct word in a more literal sense
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Sometimes you read things that remind you how vast and untamable our universe really is.
Yep, this still blows my mind, has a radius of 330 million light years, of, er, nothing (well 60 galaxies compared to what should be several thousand). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo%C3%B6tes_Void
sssh, that's where we store the hammers
I think there is a shortcut being taken here.
We are surrounded by dark objects, a rock is a dark object, exoplanets are dark objects, and so are black holes. Pretty much everything but stars are dark objects. They are all dark because they don't emit light.
Here, I think they mean stuff (whatever it is) that can only be detected by gravitational lensing, and it makes sense that it has to be extremely heavy, because gravity is so weak.
I'm not a physicist but every definition of dark matter that I read says it does not interact with electromagnetic radiation hence it is invisible, and rocks are not that dark matter (wiki. NASA, etc)
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yeah all those other things absorb light so they can be detected by the light they block and the infrared light the re-emit.
Dark matter seems more ghostly , like gravitational shadow of matter
If you think that's crazy, it's likely a drop in the bucket comared to the noumenonal world.
There's no reason to think that our senses encompass the vast majority of understanding everything in reality and current evidence that they, in fact, do not, via dark matter as a primary source.
I suspect our senses encompass a meaningless fraction of the noumenon.
In what way is dark matter not a phenomenon? Just because we don't know what it is doesn't make it a noumenon.
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What are the white blocky pixels in the picture?
Why are they there?
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45538113
Probably a small bug in the matrix
It’s nothing, mostly empty space.
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a far away civilization probably draining energy from the emptiness of space to power some AI datacenters /s
That would be about 2.5 on the Kardashev scale, and in terms of heat, between Kim and Khloé on the Kardashian scale.
Haha, superb
Is that from the sci-fi novel "Dyson Fear" :)
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AI to the edge meant they had to port CUDA to a JS framework.
That is literally the plot of the game Dyson Sphere Program.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_XqHWx-v_Y
I look forwards to the python tutorial for building gpt-2 with string theory
Those gen AI images of cats playing poker won't create their own energy, you know T_T
It's our descendants. They had to travel back in time to escape entropy and find sufficient quantities of energy to sustain them, which is why they're 10 billion light years away.
also, they didn't like what the future looked like
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Not a "distant universe" but our universe distant in time ( aka our universe in the past when it was younger ).
The title reads like astronomers found a mysterious dark object in another universe. Like a distant solar system or a distant galaxy.
Or am I misunderstanding the findings here?
no it doesn't