Under the Midnight Sky

           Right now, a lot of you are getting that god-awful grey box in place of your gifs and icons. After using the image upload option, go into HTML editor and add an s after the HTTP of the image URL and put a 31. in front of the media in place of what’s there, or if nothing’s there, you shouldn’t get the grey box. Example.

Grey Box.

as opposed to this.

So that’s cool and everything, but maybe some of you would be interested to know why this is a significant find? Beyond just its record-setting bigness.

Since Einstein, physicists have accepted something called the Cosmological Principle, which states that the universe looks the same everywhere if you view it on a large enough scale. You might find some weird shit over here, and some other freaky shit over there, but if you pull back the camera far enough, you’ll find that same weird and/or freaky shit cropping up over and over again in a fairly regular distribution. This is because the universe is (probably) infinite in size and (we are pretty darn sure) has, and has always had, the same forces acting on it everywhere.

So why is this new LQG so radical? (It stands for ‘Large Quasar Group,’ btw, not ‘Light Quasar Group.’)

Well, let’s try to comprehend the scale we’re dealing with. A ‘megaparsec,’ written Mpc, is about 3.2 million light years long. The Milky Way is about 0.03 Mpc across (or 100,000 light years). The distance between our galaxy and Andromeda, our closest galactic neighbor, is 0.75 Mpc, or 2.5 million light years. LQGs are usually about 200 Mpc across. Assuming a logarithmic distribution of weird shit outliers (if you don’t know how logarithmic distribution curves work, don’t worry about it), cosmologists predicted that nothing in the universe should be more than 370 Mpc across.

This new LQG is 1200 Mpc long. That’s four billion light years. Four BILLION LIGHT YEARS. Just to travel from one side to the other of this one thing. I mean for fuck’s sake, the universe is only about 14 billion years old! How many of these things could there be? 

Right now it looks like the Cosmological Principle might be out the window, unless physicists can find some way to make the existence of this new LQG work with the math (and boy, are they trying). And that’s totally baffling. It would mean—well, we don’t have any idea what it would mean. That the universe isn’t essentially uniform? That some ‘special’ physics apply/applied in some places but not in others? That Something Happened that is totally outside our current ability to understand or quantify stuff happening?

By the way, no one lives there. The radiation from so many quasars would sterilize rock.

       “—- tell me. Now.”

His wary eye was met with a suspicious one as she quickly looked him over. He appeared to be human- but then, so did she- and no human that she'd met so far on this planet had seemed to suspect anything, not this quickly at least.

“-- Bit of a complicated answer, that... I could probably ask you the same question, too, hmm?”

Evading the question entirely was most likely not the best idea. Delaying the answer, however, she felt she could manage that for the moment. At least until she could come up with a convincing response.