Astronomers watched 35 explosive outbursts from a rare repeating “fast radio burst” (FRB) as it shifted in frequency like a “cosmic slide whistle,” blinking in a puzzling pattern never seen before.
FRBs are millisecond-long flashes of light from beyond the Milky Way that are capable of producing as much energy in a few seconds as the sun does in a year. FRBs are believed to come from powerful objects like neutron stars with intense magnetic fields — also called magnetars — or from cataclysmic events like stellar collisions or the collapse of neutron stars to form black holes. Complicating the FRB picture, a few FRBs are “repeaters” that flash from the same spot in the sky more than once, while the majority burst once and then vanish.
I don’t know or care to speculate what it could be with my limited knowledge of astrophysics. However it’s awesome how many strange things are still out there.
Space is my jam. More strange things we’re still learning about:
There are celestial objects the size of a major city, with magnetic fields so strong they would rip the iron from your blood if it got as close as the moon.
Every planet in the solar system, and many of the dwarf planets, could fit between the earth and the moon, and still have space left over.
Know how crowded our planet is? There are voids in space hundreds of millions of lightyears across, where nearly nothing is inside. The largest we know of currently is the Böotes Void over 300MLY across, and contains only 60 galaxies. For reference, the Andromeda galaxy is only about 2 million light years away, with several smaller galaxies/clusters around us. So take a basketball and put 3 grains of sand inside, that’s about how “dense” the voids are.
Learning how empty s[pace is makes me uncomfortable. I watched a Kuzgesagt video last year about how the universe is expanding from all points and we’ll never be able to travel to other galaxies.
I just hope one day we create a warp engine of some kind to make interstellar travel possible. Right now it feels like we’re marooned on an island surrounded by dangerous ocean.
Kurzgesagt is a fantastic channel, but they don’t focus on space, which would take them from a 10/10 to a 12/10 in my opinion.
If you want some more existential dread, fascination, or just to go “huh. Didn’t know that”, there’s History of the Universe, SEA, Learning Curve, and a few others I’m sure would get recommended.
Some like Kosmos can get a bit sensational from time to time, but they also have solid videos.
PBS Space Time has a couple videos that were interesting to me but their format and voices don’t mesh with me personally, not entirely sure why.
I would like to subscribe to strange space facts. Even though I’ll never get to experience them, it feels cozy somehow just knowing about them.
What would ‘nothing’ (like in those voids) feel like, I wonder?
Like normal space, but dark and completely empty of anything except trace gasses. And given just how far away any galaxy is, I’d wager those trace gasses are extra sparse.
If Firefly is to be believed, when faced with that much nothing, some folk go mad.
I completely agree.
Right? The James Webb has taken a lot of what we assumed and just yeeted it out the window, and made me realize how little we yet know about the universe.
A alien hunting telescope picking up something that defines explanations, is sort of what I expected from alien hunting telescope news, to be honest.
But it is cool nevertheless.
It’s never a cosmic slide whistle until you’ve ruled out everything else. This could be interference from Dee-Lite. It could be Sixpence None the Richer. It could be aliens with a regular slide whistle but using an amplifier to make it seem like a cosmic slide whistle.
It’s never aliens… until it is.
Everyone has a plan until aliens punch them in the face
- Alien Mike Tyson
You missed the opportunity to cite “Mike Dyson”
Damnit! I knew there was something good in there! Well done you!
Shhh. Go edit it, and we can delete this sidebar. 🤙🏼
Nah, this is more fun. Someone literally just clicked “show more comments” and read this stupid exchange, thus wasting a tiny bit more of their life. Betcha feel kinda foolish now, you literate fuck, all knowing how to read shit. Yeah, read this sentence too, you’ll never get these two seconds back either.
A couple of posts back on my feed was about nasa sending a video of a cat via a laser beam. Can’t help thinking they’ve been intergallactically rick-rolled!
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That would be the coolest.
I am hoping, however, that this is just some dumb shit we did echoing back.
