If so, check this out.

Edit: forgot spacing after hyperlink

I suppose that would be interesting if you never went to primary school.

interesting...

Douglas Adams: "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

it should cycle faster, but interesting.

There are some cool vids you Youtube about the size of the universe. Just boggles the mind. They start talking numbers you can't even fathom (sp?) in some cases, f***ing insane.

haha VY Canis Majoris
f*** being around when that thing implodes

heh someone made a gif from those planetary scale pix that were floating around a while back. i tried to search for the thread on this forum where obes posted em but couldn't :( plus i wanted to see the pic i made for jim in it with jebus using antares as a basketball (purely for scale ;)

so instead i'll link this ... power of ten

thats awesome, and when you start to talk about distances it gets even more crazy

however this is pretty cool:

"If our Sun was replaced with VY Canis Majoris, its surface would extend to the orbit of Saturn."

This calls for a re-paste of this video (definitely worth watching!):

Nice vid Parabol, but I dont agree with the authors statement "This is a picture of 78 Billion light years" He has taken into account the rate of expansion in the universe over the period of time since the photons captured in the ultra deep field image left their point of origin. Obviously, you cant do that as the image captured the photons as they appeared at a distance of 13 billion years, not as they would now. If his calculations are correct and we want to know what those galaxies look like today, we would have to wait 78 billion years.

they say the universe is what 78 billion light years across... yet they say they can't see any further.. what happens when even better tech comes out with the ability to see even more? they just gonna keep increasing?

then u gotta think of black holes and alternates... sif anyone can say for sure how big the universe is.

last edited by Raider at 20:00:25 09/Jan/08

they say the universe is what 78 billion light years across... yet they say they can't see any further.. what happens when even better tech comes out with the ability to see even more? they just gonna keep increasing?

technically you couldn't see further than 13-14billion light years ever, because thats the age of the universe.

I didn't see Naboo there anywhere.

Clearly not accurate.

bull honky

the universe was created 5000 years ago by god

It does make you think though. Surely there has to be some sort of higher power, an "architect", that has put all of this in place and perfected it at that.

lol

the universe was created 5000 years ago by god

I actually know people who believe this :(

idol beat me to it.


gold mate.!

..ummm so can we have your liver then...



oh righto then.

haha VY Canis Majoris
f*** being around when that thing implodes

The thing's probably gone supernova even as we speak (well prolly not but it would take us 5000 years to notice). But the larger a star gets the shorter its lifespan so this mofo would prolly only 'live' for 10million years or so..

But the larger a star gets the shorter its lifespan so this mofo would prolly only 'live' for 10million years or so..

Really?? Betelgeuse, which if in the place of the sun would also be larger than the orbit of Jupiter has been around sinse near the begining of the universe. Its been around so long, and is so big, that it gave birth to most of the stars in the Orion Spur.

haha VY Canis Majoris
f*** being around when that thing implodes

Yeah you'd get cained...majorly!

ba doom tish!

Betelgeuse, which if in the place of the sun would also be larger than the orbit of Jupiter has been around sinse near the begining of the universe.

Wikipedia says "Betelgeuse is only around 10 million years old"; obviously its not authoritative - where'd you read it was that old? Be interested to see what it says.

Yeah, I'm gonna need to see a birth certificate for that thanks.

Well reeaaaalllly large stars like betelguise and canis majoris usually only live 10-100 or more million years coz they are so much more unstable and use energy quicker.

Surely there has to be some sort of higher power, an "architect", that has put all of this in place and perfected it at that.

Yeah, surely.

It does make you think though. Surely there has to be some sort of higher power, an "architect", that has put all of this in place and perfected it at that.

Why yes, they certainly couldn't be a more feasible, logical explanation.

There is.

A) Gravity slowly pulls all the hydrogen into a big ball and keeps pulling more matter into it since the gravity would get stronger and stronger the more dense it gets
B) The gravity gets sooooo strong that fusion starts happening. When the gravity is immense due to all the blobs of hydrogen coallescing into a big ball (star born), hydrogen atoms start colliding, and in the process partially giving off light (higher frequencies at hotter temperatures) and forming helium molecules and so and so forth.
C) When massive nebulas start coalescing they usually end up forming large stars. Essentially to make a huge star you need a s***eload of matter, whereas with the sun there wasn;t all that much so it formed a smaller however longer-living star.
D) The larger the star the quicker the fuel is burnt and fused due to the gravity forcing the fusion processes more and more etc.

So the larger the star, the hotter it is, the 'whiter' the star due to its higher frequency light (including gamma rays and x-rays (though more common in black jholes and neutron stars).

Yeah, I just re read the site I got the info from. I've decided they cant be trusted, fukers.

Yeah and I'm gonna go ahead and have to take back what I wrote. Just ignore me for now :)

But, having said that, I dont trust info off Wiki. Its banned as a source of info by just about every uni in the world.

last edited by E.T. at 22:12:51 10/Jan/08

i prefer the video where it just keeps zoomingout until ur nothing

How far does the universe stretch?? where does it stop?? and whats beyond that?? when did the universe start?? how?? and what was before that??

so many unanswered questions :/

Well I believe in the notion that the universe is the (f***kkkkkkkeennnnnnnnn huuuuuuuuggggggeeeeee) blob of matter and particles and stuff and that space itself (a void) goes on forever after reaching the edges of the universe. I mean seriously, wtf could it possibly do otherwise. Just stop and there be nothing? That wouldnt be a valid answer coz u cant simply stop and not exist beyond a certain point. that would just be non-sensical.

my 2¢

Watch that doco on strings and m-theory and d-branes, it's perspective, as taken from quantam theorists, is that the universe exists on a membrane and came about as a temporary aftershock of an adjacent membrane colliding with it, which in itself may be a tiny part of some larger model :/

Oh and it's all happening in another dimension or some s***!
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/

last edited by Idol at 23:22:43 10/Jan/08

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/PaleBlueDot.jpg

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot

Douglas Adams: "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

Let's assume the Universe is 100 billion light years across, and that we're travelling at the speed you drive down the coast?

It would take you roughly 1,798,754,748,000,000,000,000 (1.7 billion trillion) years to 'drive' down the coast and across the whole universe and even so it would take 72 billion years just to drive to the nearest star, only 4 measly light years away). Is that not vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big?

i know something that's bigger

when you get to the edge of the universe you fall off the edge.. kinda like when the world was flat

It does make you think though. Surely there has to be some sort of higher power, an "architect", that has put all of this in place and perfected it at that.

Heh I read this the other day:

A New Zealand physicist has written a paper saying that physicists should seriously explore the possibility the universe is a giant virtual reality simulation. He says that the existence of quantum phenomena could be due to the underlying digital nature of the simulation and also claims his VR hypothesis can explain relativity, the big bang and more. It should be possible to perform experiments to prove the hypothesis too. He reasons that if reality was to do something that information processing cannot, then it cannot be virtual.

pharcyde = carl sagan

A New Zealand physicist has written a paper saying that physicists should seriously explore the possibility the universe is a giant virtual reality simulation. He says that the existence of quantum phenomena could be due to the underlying digital nature of the simulation and also claims his VR hypothesis can explain relativity, the big bang and more. It should be possible to perform experiments to prove the hypothesis too. He reasons that if reality was to do something that information processing cannot, then it cannot be virtual.

Soo.. did he take the Red pill or the Blue pill?