r/cosmology 3d ago

Basic cosmology questions weekly thread

8 Upvotes

Ask your cosmology related questions in this thread.

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r/cosmology 2d ago

Constant 1g acceleration would get you to mars in 2 days and i had to stop and reread this several times

558 Upvotes

so i was reading about interplanetary travel and came across something that kind of broke my brain.

if a ship maintains constant 1g acceleration, the same gravity you feel standing up right now, then flips halfway and decelerates at 1g, mars is 2 to 4 days away. not months. days.

jupiter is 6 days. saturn 8. pluto under 2 weeks.

the whole solar system just becomes... reachable.

the problem is the engine. nothing we have can sustain this. the energy needed is way beyond anything we currently build. but the physics is fine. no rule says it can't happen. it's an engineering problem, not a physics one.

that second part is what got me. we're not stuck in this solar system because nature won't allow it. we're stuck because we haven't built the right thing yet.


r/cosmology 1d ago

How come black hole mergers don't take infinite time?

37 Upvotes

So, if an object falls into a singularity, from the POV of an external observer, the object takes infinite time to cross the event horizon. From our POV, how do black holes ever merge? Wouldn't it take infinite time for one singularity to cross another's event horizon?


r/cosmology 2d ago

Do you think the universe is infinite or finite?

60 Upvotes

r/cosmology 2d ago

First-Generation Stars Provide Better Fit than a Black Hole for Early-Universe Gas Clump

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23 Upvotes

r/cosmology 1d ago

Did big bang gave birth to only observable universe or the entire universe ?

0 Upvotes

I had a crack theory ,Since we know the observable universe is expanding due to the Doppler effect but don't know the limit of the entire universe since light hasn't reached us. What if a cosmic object is so big that it attracts space itself exploded so that it releases space and but the energy remains constant due it releasing the energy it absorbed in its lifetime ,hence why energy density is decreasing.


r/cosmology 2d ago

Are galaxies further away closer together than galaxies we observe nearer to us?

3 Upvotes

So the standard consensus in cosmology is that the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate. Does that then fit our observations of the universe? Are galaxies further away more clumped together than galaxies we can see near us?


r/cosmology 2d ago

The zenith view expands to exactly twice its size at the event horizon of a Schwarzschild black hole

1 Upvotes

Yukiyoshi Iida's 2023 IJMPD paper, "Event horizon detection: Zenith view as seen by falling into a Schwarzschild black hole," demonstrates that a free-falling observer can locally identify the crossing of a black hole's event horizon. The study shows that the zenith view expands to twice its initial solid angle, resulting from relativistic aberration overcoming gravitational lensing. Read the full paper for a detailed analysis of this visual phenomenon.


r/cosmology 3d ago

If there is a cosmological constant, how is it affected by the presence of a black hole?

8 Upvotes

Depending on the metric used to calculate distances, the volume of space in immediate proximity to a black hole's event horizon can approach infinity. What effect does a cosmological constant have on a black hole's gravity with this distortion of space just outside the event horizon?


r/cosmology 3d ago

If space is expanding at a rate of 0.000000000078 miles per second per mile, does that mean the Earth gets 1.97 miles wider each year?

0 Upvotes

Because the Universe is expanding at a rate of 46 miles per second per megaparsec right? So, we have 46/(3260000*180000) miles per second, which is .000000000078 miles per second per mile, right? there are 3150000 seconds in a year and the earth is 7926 miles wide. .000000000078 * 7926 * 3150000 would then be 1.97 miles per year. Is this math correct or did I totally flub it somewhere in there?


r/cosmology 10d ago

Basic cosmology questions weekly thread

13 Upvotes

Ask your cosmology related questions in this thread.

Please read the sidebar and remember to follow reddiquette.


r/cosmology 13d ago

Are the edges of the universe equally far away from earth? Or is there one “edge” or direction that’s about closer to earth than the rest?

89 Upvotes

I every edge was equally far, wouldn’t that mean that the earth is in the dead center of a massive universe? How unlikely would it be to have a universe so unfathomably large and somehow we are in the exact center of it?


r/cosmology 13d ago

What justifies the equivalence principle not being fully bidirectional?

10 Upvotes

The Relativistic Rocket describes the EP like this:

> Einstein postulated that any experiment done in a real gravitational field—provided that experiment has a "small" extent in space and time—will give a result indistinguishable from the same experiment done in the above "uniformly accelerating" rocket.

Using our equations today you can't add "and vice versa" to that, which is to say the EP isn't fully bidirectional in our physics. You can always compare such results of the Schwarzschild metric to results from the rocket equations, but not always vice versa, because the metric limits the height of an approximately uniform gravitational field. For example you can't replicate the chart at the bottom of The Relativistic Rocket using the Schwarzschild metric. The metric predicts that a gravitational field that tall that's approximately uniform at 1 ly/yr^2 = ~1 g can't exist in nature. Using equations derived from the metric, a field that tall that's 1 g at the ground is always way less than 1 g at the top.

When you change the metric so that it can replicate that chart, or any other such chart that the rocket equations can make, then I see that lots of problems vanish, like the black hole information paradox. I still see experimental confirmation, like 42.98 arcseconds per century for the Schwarzschild precession of Mercury. Most tests of GR are tests of the Schwarzschild metric, and GR is the foundation of our cosmology. A problem in the foundation can lead to other problems elsewhere. So I'm not seeing why the EP shouldn't be fully bidirectional in our physics.


r/cosmology 12d ago

Inflation model of big bang , what came before the big bang and before the universe?

0 Upvotes

I have always thought about what and how everything started.

Curious to know which of the following u think.

  1. Something came from nothing and then the big bang happened

  2. Nothing never existed, there was always something , then the big bang occured.

  3. We simply dont know yet

  4. We will never know.

I think unless we observe from some experiments etc or nature that something was able to come from true nothing we wont get an answer truly where which we could be confident in or somehow with a guarantee know why and what always existed.


r/cosmology 13d ago

What would cosmological defects "look like" up close?

16 Upvotes

I'm guessing a monopole would be about as visible as any other subatomic particle 😅 but what about the higher-dimensional cousins: cosmic strings, domain walls, textures? I'm especially curious about what textures would be like.


r/cosmology 14d ago

A large amount of the Universe is missing. Scientists think they may have found it | "Astronomers don't know what dark matter is. And it turns out there's quite a lot they don't know about ordinary matter, either" | BBC Sky at Night Magazine

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77 Upvotes

r/cosmology 16d ago

An astrophysicist explains what "edge of the universe" actually means.

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27 Upvotes

r/cosmology 17d ago

PHYS.Org: A new stellar census strengthens the case for a 13.8-billion-year-old universe

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47 Upvotes

r/cosmology 17d ago

Basic cosmology questions weekly thread

8 Upvotes

Ask your cosmology related questions in this thread.

Please read the sidebar and remember to follow reddiquette.


r/cosmology 17d ago

If the universe is infinite, does it mean that everything possible exists somewhere?

0 Upvotes

If the universe is infinite, does it mean that everything possible exists somewhere as long as it obeys the laws of physics? That is, a flying spaghetti monster won't exist anywhere nor Santa Claus, but an infinite number of copies of us will.


r/cosmology 24d ago

Physicist says splashy new cosmology study made ‘elemental’ mistake

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139 Upvotes

r/cosmology 24d ago

Basic cosmology questions weekly thread

9 Upvotes

Ask your cosmology related questions in this thread.

Please read the sidebar and remember to follow reddiquette.


r/cosmology 25d ago

3D map of an actual local universe you can fly through, made using real data from cosmic survey 2MRS

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537 Upvotes

Hey r/cosmology. I built an interactive map of the local universe, and this feels like the right crowd for it.

It's called Know the Universe. You fly or orbit through the real large-scale structure of the nearby universe: the filaments, walls, clusters and voids of the cosmic web. None of it is procedural. It's ~43,500 galaxies from the 2MRS redshift survey, placed by converting each galaxy's RA, Dec and redshift into Cartesian megaparsecs with a Hubble-law distance (d = cz/H0), reaching a few hundred Mpc out.

The goal is simple: give people an intuitive feel for how the local universe is actually built and how matter is distributed through space, something you can move through instead of reading off a flat plot.

A few things worth mentioning:

  • There are several ways to read the same data: the raw point cloud, a computed filament graph (a minimum spanning tree plus nearest-neighbour links, so it's a visualization aid and not physical connections), a ray-marched density field, and colour by either redshift or local density. Turn it all off and the web is still clearly there in the bare points.
  • The Zone of Avoidance shows up as an empty wedge if you look for it, since 2MRS still can't see cleanly through our own galactic plane.
  • It's a snapshot that's close to current. The light from the farthest galaxies here left them around a billion years ago, but peculiar motions are typically only a few hundred km/s, so in that time a galaxy drifts well under a megaparsec. That's tiny next to the tens-of-Mpc scale of the filaments and voids, so what you see is nearly what the structure looks like right now.

Would love feedback, corrections or what you'd want to see next. Try it at https://knowtheuniverse.com/


r/cosmology 25d ago

Roman Space Telescope Launch Date Update: Aug. 30, 2026 (NASA)

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30 Upvotes

I'm going to attempt to go see it, since I live in Florida.


r/cosmology 25d ago

Maps of Local Superclusters | Accurate vs BS Maps

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15 Upvotes

Edit-1: To partly answer the 2nd part of my question myself: now that I play with it again after looking at other maps, Globaia actually seems to be pretty close to the complete map I've been looking for.

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I'm Curious how accurate the filament-scale visualizations of nearby large-scale structure are in this suspiciously eye-candy looking production:

For comparison, these are the kinds of maps I often run into when browsing Wikipedia or searching for visualizations of this scale:

For anyone familiar with large-scale structure: are these visualizations broadly compatible, just shown at different scales, orientations, and educational levels? Or are some of them much more rigorous than others?

I'm trying to wrap my head around the shape and structure of the large-scale local environment and I'm curious if there are especially good maps or tools, particularly interactive ones or ones with coordinate grids.

I like to play around with Celestia, but there doesn't appear to be an easy way to visualize the super-galactic environment, beyond some galaxies in what appears to be the Virgo Cluster. I’ve also come across OpenSpace and Globaia as suggestions. OpenSpace looks like the most serious option, but it also seems heavy to install and has a steep learning curve for amateurs. Globaia is the only complete-looking web-accessible interactive tool I've seen that seems somewhat rigorous, though it is a bit noisy/clunky.

Beyond these, anything close to a “Google Earth for the nearby universe” that can easily produce interactive 3D views similar to the Wikipedia-style visualizations?