#cosmology

In this video, take a flight through millions of galaxies mapped using coordinate data from DESI.

Credit: Fiske Planetarium, CU Boulder and DESI collaboration

Rocky’s gift to Grace immediately reminded me of the Voyager Pulsar Map

When Rocky gives him that little model with all the connected points and lines, Grace somehow catches on almost instantly that Rocky is from 40 Eridani. And at first i was like how the hell did he recognize that pattern so fast???

And then it clicked for me...

It visually mirrors the pulsar map placed on the Voyager probe. I'm aware they work differently because the Voyager Pulsar Map is about locating Earth in the galaxy using fixed pulsar landmarks, while Rocky’s model is just mapping local star distances from 40 eridani to systems like Tau Ceti, but it’s just cool because they’re alike in the way they both use spatial patterns instead of language to show where something is from and how to get there.

The concept is so similar that your brain immediately associates it with “location,” “origin,” “this is where i am from”

If you don't know, the pulsar map on Voyager was basically humanity trying to leave behind an address in space. If extraterrestrial life ever found the probe, the map could theoretically help them trace where it came from. It was humanity saying: hey, you found our probe. Please return to Earth!

I like to think that is why Grace understood it so quickly. Because even without language, the idea behind it is strangely universal. Every intelligent life form wants to know the same things:

Hindu cosmology.

Our Wonder World. 1930.

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!