NASA Discovers Mysterious Structure Near the Edge of the Universe That Breaks Our Cosmology.

the universe as a whole is extremely difficult to comprehend it's much larger than we can imagine with hundreds of billions of galaxies within it despite all the Milestones achieved in space exploration for decades we are still far from having deciphered all the mysteries of the cosmos this is due in no small part to the fact that there may be galaxies and formations in space that simply elude our Earthly gaze the mysterious structures could lie outside the boundaries of the universe holding terrifying secrets that can shatter our perception of the cosmos and now thanks to the Evermore advanced technology we finally may have found one of these in our own universe join us as we dig deep into the bizarre structures found near the edge of the universe that could simply blow your mind thank you to begin with we know two crucial facts the first is that the Universe began just shy of 14 billion years ago in a singular event called the Big Bang the second is that ordinary visible light has a finite speed it travels at the amazing rate of 300 000 kilometers per second or 186 000 miles per second or fast enough to circle the Earth about seven times in a single second we call the distance light can travel in a year a light year which is equivalent to about 10 trillion kilometers or 6 trillion miles another important idea we need to understand is the difference between the visible Universe versus the entire universe the first is what we can see and the other is everything this isn't so hard to understand someone standing at the roof of the tallest building on the planet the Burj Khalifa in Dubai can see in every direction for about a hundred kilometers or 60 miles however the surface of the Earth is much bigger than that and the curvature of the planet makes it impossible to see everything with the universe the limiting factor is different it's the speed of light if our universe were static and unchanging which isn't true the farthest thing we could see would be 14 billion light years away that's because of an object that far away emitted light the moment the universe began that light would just now be arriving at Earth light emitted from an object located 15 billion light years away wouldn't arrive here at Earth for another billion years so we couldn't have seen it yet in our hypothetical static Universe the visible Universe would be a sphere surrounding the earth with a radius of 14 billion light years the entire universe might be bigger than that but we would have no way of knowing since light from Far distant locations hasn't arrived yet but the universe isn't static and that complicates things the universe began in the Big Bang and that bang caused the universe to expand as it travels light has to fight against that expansion which takes it longer to get to you to understand this suppose a child stands 10 meters away from you and rolls a ball towards you at two meters per second it will take five seconds for the ball to get to you now suppose we have the same situation where you are standing on firm ground but the child is on one of those moving walkways you find in airports suppose further that the walkway is moving away from you at one meter per second because of the motion of the walkway the ball will not take five seconds to get to you it will take 10. alas it gets more complicated while the child was 10 meters away from you when they rolled the ball because of the motion of the walkway the child will be 20 meters away from you when the ball gets to you the same thing has happened to the visible light from The Big Bang that light traveled for 14 billion years to arrive at Earth now and just like the child on the moving walkway the current location of whatever emitted that earliest light isn't 14 billion light years away it's Now 46 billion light years away we see the light from where it was emitted not where the emission source is now in this way astronomers can say with confidence that the visible Universe which is the sphere around the earth out to the distance of the oldest thing we can see is 92 billion light years in diameter that is edge to edge but that is merely the visible Universe what about the entire universe how can we know about parts that are so far away that we have not even seen yet well that's where things get really interesting since we can only see things when the light they emit or reflect reaches us we can never see farther than the farthest distance light can travel in the time the universe has existed that means the observable universe keeps getting brighter but it is finite the amount is sometimes referred to as the Hubble volume after the telescope that has given us our most distant views of the universe we'll never be able to see beyond that boundary so for all intents and purposes it's the only Universe we'll ever interact with but we know with some certainty that there's more Universe out there beyond that boundary astronomers think space might be infinite with stuff energy galaxies Etc distributed pretty much the same as it is in the observable universe if it is that has some seriously weird implications for what lies out there beyond the Hubble volume you won't just find more different planets you will eventually find every possible thing I'll read that again and let it sink in everything if you go far enough you'll find another solar system with an earth identical in every way except that you had cereal for breakfast this morning instead of eggs and another where you skipped breakfast and one where you got up early and robbed a bank in fact cosmologists think that if you go far enough you will find another Hubble volume that is perfectly identical to ours there's another version of you out there mirroring your every action 10 to 10 to the 188th meters away that may seem unlikely but then Infinity is awfully infinite indeed in 2008 astronomers discovered something very strange and unexpected Galactic clusters were all streaming in the same direction at immense speed over 2 million miles per hour new observations in 2010 confirm this phenomenon known as the dark flow the movement defies all predictions about the distribution of mass throughout the Universe after the big bang one possible cause massive structures outside the Hubble volume exerting gravitational influence this would mean that the structure of the infinite universe beyond our view is not uniform as for the structures themselves they could be literally anything from aggregations of matter and energy on scales we can barely imagine to bizarre warps funneling gravitational forces from other universes the story doesn't stop there in 2021 British PhD student Alexia Lopez was analyzing the light coming from distant quasars when she made a startling Discovery challenging our very understanding of the universe specifically she detected a giant almost symmetrical Arc of galaxies 9.3 billion light years away in the constellation of booties the herdsmen spanning a mass of 3.3 billion light years across the structure is a whopping 1 1 15 the radius of the observable universe if we could see it from Earth it would be the size of 35 full moons displayed across the sky known as the giant Ark the structure throws into question some of the basic assumptions about the universe according to the standard model of cosmology the theory on which our understanding of the universe is based matter should be more or less evenly distributed cross space when scientists view the Universe on very large scales there should be no noticeable irregularities everything should look the same in every direction yet the giant Arc isn't the only example of its kind these gargantuan structures are now forcing scientists to reassess their theory of how the universe evolved Lopez was studying for her master's degree at the University of Central Lancashire in the United Kingdom when her supervisor suggested using a new method to analyze large-scale structures in the universe she used quasars distant galaxies that emit an extraordinary amount of light to look for signs of ionized magnesium a sure sign of gas clouds surrounding a Galaxy when the light passes through the ionized magnesium certain frequencies are absorbed leaving unique light signatures astronomers can detect as Lopez says I looked into the known and documented Galaxy clusters and then started plotting what these areas look like in the magnesium-2 method one cluster I looked at was very small but when I plotted it in magnesium 2 there was this interesting dense band of magnesium absorption across the field of view this is how I ended up discovering it it was a happy accident and I was just lucky that it was me that found it what Lopez's happy accident uncovered was simply astonishing when looking towards the constellation booties a cluster of between 45 to 50 gas clouds each associated with at least one Galaxy seem to arrange themselves in an arc 3.3 billion light years across that is a considerable size given the observable universe's 94 billion light years wide according to Lopez's article it is extremely unlikely a probability of just .0003 percent that such a large structure could have Arisen by chance it suggests that it may have formed due to Something in the natural physics of the universe that we currently don't account for her findings directly challenge a central facet of the standard cosmological model the best explanation we have for How the Universe started and evolved this facet known as the cosmological principle states that on a large scale the universe should look roughly the same everywhere no matter your position or direction in which you are looking there should be no giant structures rather space should be smooth and uniform this is convenient as it lets researchers draw conclusions about the Holy inverse based only on what we see from our corner of it however it also makes sense as following the Big Bang the universe expanded outwards flinging matter in every direction simultaneously there's another problem according to the standard model structures like the giant Arc simply wouldn't have had time to form the current idea for how structures formed in the universe is through a process known as gravitational instability says Suber sarkar a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Oxford about a million years after the big bang when the universe was expanding tiny fluctuations in density led to bits of matter clumping together over billions of years the pull of gravity eventually LED these clumps to form stars and galaxies however there is a size limit to this process anything larger than about 1.2 billion light years across simply wouldn't have had sufficient time to form to form structures you need particles to congregate close to each other so gravitational collapse can occur says sarkar those particles would have to move in from outside the structure to get there so if your structure is 500 million light years across light would take 500 million years to move from one end to the other however the particles we are talking about are moving much much slowly than that so it would take billions of years to create a structure of this size and the universe has only been around for about 14 billion years the giant Arc discovered by Lopez isn't the only large-scale structure discovered by astronomers there's the Great Wall also called The cfa2 Great Wall of galaxies discovered in 1989 by Margaret Geller and John hutra the wall is approximately 500 million light years long 300 million light years wide and 15 million light years thick even bigger is the Sloan Great Wall a cosmic structure formed by a giant wall of galaxies discovered in 2003 by Jay Richard Gott III and Mario jurik and their colleagues at Princeton University that wall is nearly 1.5 billion light years in length in the last decade the discovery of these behemoths has accelerated even further in 2014 scientists discovered the lanayakia supercluster a collection of galaxies in which our own Milky Way resides lanayakia is 520 million light years across and contains roughly the mass of a hundred million billion Suns then in 2016 the boss Great Wall a complex of galaxies over 1 billion light years across was uncovered boss is made up of 830 separate galaxies that gravity has pulled into four superclusters the galaxies are connected by long filaments of hot gas in 2020 the South Pole wall which stretches 1.4 billion light years across was also added to the list however the current record holder for the biggest of these structures is the Hercules Corona Borealis Great Wall discovered in 2013 it spans 10 billion light years more than one tenth the size of the visible universe we calculated it and then realized oh this is the biggest thing in the universe says John hakila professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville their concern was justified both hakila and Lopez formed a range of statistical tests to try to prove that the results couldn't be down to chance for the giant Arc the results have a confidence level of 99.9997 in scientific research the gold standard for statistical significance is known as five Sigma which equates to a probability of about 1 in 3.5 million that the results are down to Chance the giant Arc reached a significance of 4.5 Sigma so there's still a possibility that the structure is a chance arrangement of stars our eyes are very good at seeing patterns you might see initials in the clouds but that's not a real structure your mind is imposing a structure on what is actually random explains sarkar however I don't think that that is the case in this situation I think it is a genuinely physical chain of super clusters he says more structures like the giant Arc and the Hercules Corona Borealis Great Wall are proven to exist astronomers will be forced to rewrite or at least revise the standard model of cosmology it isn't the first time that the model will have had to have been adapted in 1933 Caltech scientist Frick zwicki measured the mass of a cluster of galaxies and found the number to be smaller than he expected the mass was so small in fact that the galaxies should have flown apart and escaped the gravitational pull of the cluster something else therefore must hold the clusters of galaxies together he figured this something is dark matter a mysterious substance thought to make up 27 of the universe then in 1998 the model was further adapted to include Dark Energy after two independent teams of astronomers measured the expansion of the universe and found that it was actually speeding up either way we should know for sure within the next few years as Advanced Technologies May provide astronomers with an unprecedented view of the universe this is in part why infrared telescopes such as NASA's newest Flagship Mission the James Webb Space Telescope are so crucial to understanding the early universe there's an edge to where we can see it in the wavelengths we're familiar with at distances of 31 billion light years corresponding to a time of just 550 million years after the big bang we reached the edge of what we call reionization where the majority of the universe is mostly transparent to Optical light reionization is a gradual process that takes place unevenly it's like a jagged porous wall in a lot of ways some places see this reionization happen earlier which is how Hubble spotted its most distant Galaxy ever at 32 billion light years away just 407 million years after the big bang but other regions remain partially neutral until nearly a billion years have passed jwst has now taken us even farther showing us galaxies as far back as 330 million years after the big bang where they still appear large evolved and are not quite pristine in terms of the elements that are present within them there must still be stars and galaxies out there Beyond even what jwst has shown us so far Beyond those limits of what our current telescopes can see we can still measure the indirect signs that stars have formed through the emission of light from hydrogen atoms themselves which only occurs when stars form ionization occurs and then the free electrons recombine with the ionized nuclei emitting light in the aftermath of that right now we only have the indirect signatures of this signature of early star formation although there are many that dispute the validity of this signal indicating that young galaxies existed as early as 180 to 260 million years after the big bang these proto-galaxies formed Enough stars that we can see the first hints of their existence buried in the data corresponding to a distance of between 34 and 36 billion light years away Although our current telescopes haven't seen these galaxies directly the great expectation of many astronomers is that a long enough Deep Field exposure with jwst Will Reveal them however noting that although we can look as far away as our telescopes can take us there will always be a fundamental limit even if space itself is infinite the amount of time that passes since the hot big bang is not no matter how long we wait there will always be an edge that will never be able to see past well that's all the information we have for you today don't forget to give us a thumbs up if you enjoyed today's episode subscribe if you haven't already and hit that Bell so you never miss out on future episodes and be sure to tell us what you think about today's content everyone's support motivates us to continue delivering quality content and to always improve as always thanks for watching and we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: EYES 200M

Views: 1,990

Keywords: EYES 200M, SPACE, new discovery, explore 2023, universe, space, science, scientists, galaxy, earth, spacex, nasa, black hole, moon Scientists Discovered, Scientists Are Worried, Should We Worry, Worry, Discovered, Just Discovered, Something Strange, Found, Scientists Can’t Explain, What’s Hidden Under, NASA, james webb space telescope, Exoplanet, Real Images, NASA Discovers Mysterious Structure Near the Edge of the Universe That Breaks Our Cosmology

Id: w0Rdsu3Lbvo

Length: 21min 41sec (1301 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 12 2023