one of the things I love about modern physics and astronomy, compare to a few decades ago, is that is rapidly becoming apparent that we do not actually understand the universe as much as we thought we did.
from a red dwarf that appears to be older than the universe, to supermassive black holes forming way too early in the universe, to a supermassive black hole speeding across the universe (what kind of energy could have possibly been used to fling something of that mass at that speed?), to dark matter and dark energy apparently existing but refusing to show themselves, to quantum mechanics and general relativity not getting along despite being our two most reliable theories of physics experimentally, to the weird coincidence that any detector capable of detecting a graviton would have to be so massive it would collapse into a black hole (in fact, exactly massive enough to do so).
a number of these were known facts in the 20th century, but so many of them have built up since then that is throwing our neat little models of everything into chaos. WHICH IS AMAZING, BECAUSE IT MEANS THAT SCIENTISTS CAN NOW MAKE NEW THEORIES ABOUT HOW THINGS WORK BASED ON THE RAPIDLY EMERGING DATA!
also, on a different note, I think it is the coolest thing ever that we figured out a way to DETECT GRAVITY WAVES! just the craziest breakthrough in cosmology since the creation of the telescope, no biggie.
kianamaiart
tangentwithtanner
annaxmalina
gummygunk
