ok! time for all those years of science to finally pay off:
Would you still love “her” if you knew that, every single second, thousands of waves of extreme radiation from the Sun, traveling at a million light-years per millisecond, hits our planet’s atmosphere? These waves slowly erode one of the only protections that we have against the Sun. But don’t worry, this planet has several more tricks up – and under – the crust of the Earth. The iron core of the earth emits a geomagnetic field that extends into space, creating a region called the magnetosphere. This magnetosphere blocks most of the Sun’s deadly rays, deflecting them back into space.
(also I didn’t get this off of Google. I just have a really good memory. also I added the bolded words)
traveling at a million light-years per millisecond
You’re only off by a factor of about 30 quadrillion.
Light (famously a type of radiation), takes 1 year to travel a light-year, hence the name.
If you want to make it sound impressive, then astronomical units aren’t the right choice. The sun is only 1 AU away from us after all.
Um, yes because without those waves plants wouldn’t grow and we wouldn’t be alive.
million light-years per millisecond
Gonna need a citation on that one! ;)
kidding aside, Mars is a great example of what will happen to Earth should our core stop generating our magnetic field. Also… Auroras!
Yes! The Auroras are the result of the Sun’s rays that were rebounded and sent to both of the poles. Also, I don’t know the exact speed, but its really reeeeeaaaaalyyyyy fucking fast. Like, my brain can’t even fathom how fast it is. I can’t imagine the scientists that study this every single day think. Are they like “oh shit the sun is just about to shart some deadly fucking radiation time to do some science to make it stop” I am actually convinced that science is magic, and every scientist that ever lived had to say some oath to never tell people that they’re wizards. Meanwhile we’re like “oh ok they have this tool that looks like a medieval torture device they either must be really smart or stole that from a museum or time-traveled and yoinked that shit and brought it back here”
If those deadly rays are getting reflected back into space, how do astronauts protect themselves against it? Is the ISS beneath the magnetosphere?
On the side of the Earth facing the sun, the magnetosphere extends about 40,000km into space. On the side facing away from the sun, the solar wind stretches the magnetosphere into a tail that extends well beyond the Moon’s orbit. The ISS orbits at an altitude of about 400km; it is well within the magnetosphere.
Because it is above the majority of the atmosphere (and also because it just barely passes through the lowest part of the Van Allen radiation belts), astronauts in the ISS are exposed to higher levels of radiation. However, the ISS has shielding specifically designed to minimize radiation, and astronauts living there are considered to be within safe levels of exposure.
I don’t know. science, I guess?
It’s all oszillations.
Fun, fun, we skip along together!
Swirling towards the center…
Where there is no pain and we are truly together, forever.
…
Eat at Arby’s
burma shave
I saw that once and thought that it was an actual jingle for an Arby’s commercial x_x
May I have a point of reference?
Edit: in all seriousness, looking for the point of poignancy
There was a twitter account that went by nihilistic arby’s and they posted stuff like this.
Thanks! Also, like your usrname :)
Sun: “Hey, do you want toooo… go for a walk?”
Planets: go apeshit
Based on how Earth is doing, she might be taking us to the big farm upstate. :(
Earth is fine, it’s seen worse than humanity. Geology doesn’t care about what biology does.
We can make it care, just got to tell old donny up in the whitehouse that something doesn’t care about his wishes.
Uhhm guyss shes just taking us around the galaxy
and where is the galaxy taking us then?
To visit/fistfight the Andromeda galaxy.
to the Great Attractor
Through a series of peculiar velocity tests, astrophysicists found that the Milky Way was moving in the direction of the constellation of Centaurus at about 600 km/s. [citation needed] Then, the discovery of cosmic microwave background (CMB) dipoles was used to reflect the motion of the Local Group of galaxies towards the Great Attractor.[8] The 1980s brought many discoveries about the Great Attractor, such as the fact that the Milky Way is not the only galaxy impacted. Approximately 400 elliptical galaxies are moving toward the Great Attractor beyond the Zone of Avoidance caused by the Milky Way galaxy light.
We’re actually traveling with a lot of friends through the immeasurable heavens.
The Great Attractor is actually a giant construct to escape the universe. https://xeelee.fandom.com/wiki/Bolder's_Ring
I’ll try spinning! that’s a good trick!
Not sure I like the sound of that.
but it’s so attractive
It’s ok, the universe is expanding faster than the Milky Way can be attracted.
To the Andromeda Galaxy
Fun fact, the two galaxie’s outer dust clouds are already touching.
😳
Another fun fact, they might miss each other.
Andromeda and Milky way might marry each other and become one flesh and one soul like Jesus Christ intended it to be.
And we either won’t be invited to the wedding or we will be left behind at the wedding venue.
(When the two galaxies merge we either won’t notice it except seeing the stars dancing in the night’s sky or the planets of our solar system will be flung out of orbit and turning Earth into a rogue planet.)
Earth might go on to start a whole new life in some new place just like my dad.
Wait till you read about the Lambda Model
I read “Dark energy” and immediately thought of Voldie the wart (Voldemort)
There’s also no reason to believe that expansion isn’t happening in a spheroid pattern. The big bang wouldn’t have been like a blunderbuss, more like a naval mine suspended in the abyss, exploding in all directions.
For that matter, did the big bang ever cease, or has it continued to spew out new energy, and we’re just so inconceivably far out that our entire observable universe is just one small section of a relatively narrow range of distance from the center?
Lastly, if the big bang is like a faucet, what if black holes are like drains in a tub, or in other words wormholes leading back to whatever realm everything came from before being spewed out by the big bang?
Everything in the universe is cyclical; there’s no way something doesn’t complete the circuit, even if it’s just a big crunch.
This model does assume the big bang happened in a spheroid pattern. It’s just flattened to add time as an axis from left to right cause you couldn’t represent time otherwise.
The big bang didn’t happen in a pattern, it happened everywhere at once: https://nasaspacenews.com/2025/10/is-the-universe-infinite-new-evidence-challenges-our-cosmic-understanding/
The universe expanding means it gets sparser. It has no edge and no center, so it’s not spherical. It’s either infinite or repeating (e.g. it might be the surface of a 4D torus, but as said: that doesn’t imply an edge). I personally believe it’s infinite and not repeating.
You could represent time as the distance from center to circumference, although that wouldn’t be as readily comprehensible at a glance. It’s more like the image just shows a chunk out of that sphere
There’s also no reason to believe that the big bang happened at one “point”. I believe that the universe (and therefore the big bang) are infinite.
Everything is relative, so something infinite can still expand: since there’s no absolute speed, galaxies can move away from each other everywhere, at all times.
The geometry of explosions says otherwise. An explosion implies expansion outward from a center. If every point in space exploded at once, there would be nowhere for anything to expand, thus creating compressive forces.
You would have to zoom out really really far, beyond the boundaries of the explosion, to see the forces expanding beyond that. And at that point, it’s just the Big Bang, only on a larger scale, and with the singularity being really a vast space seen from a much larger scale.
To illustrate, one speck of C4 explodes in an outward direction, but put a million specks of C4 together into a continuous block, and it still explodes in an outward direction. It’s not a million tiny explosions all taking place within the space of the block.
No, there’s no center and no edge, the big bang happened everywhere at once. The universe might be finite, but only in the sense that it’s looping back on itself, not in the sense that it can possibly be a sphere (which has both center and edge). So your mental model of an explosion in 3D space doesn’t fit: https://nasaspacenews.com/2025/10/is-the-universe-infinite-new-evidence-challenges-our-cosmic-understanding/
Metaphors like this at helpful for approaching understanding, but you can’t extrapolate from them. There was no 3D space in which the big bang occurred, “nothing” is not the same as “a patch of vacuum in spacetime”. An explosion doesn’t start as dimensionless singularity, it starts with the matter that explodes. And so on.
I think it’s a logical necessity for the universe to be infinite, at least spatially. In order to be finite, it needs to have something outside of it to set a boundary containing it. But if that were the case, then there must be something beyond it, which means the space contained within that boundary would not be the entirety of the universe.
Whether that space beyond is filled with anything or simply empty until stuff expands into it is a different question. And whether there were multiple other big bangs incomprehensibly far away from the observable universe is another question too. But neither of those possibilities implies that the big bang would have happened at every point in space simultaneously.
Another reason that possibility is untenable is because of heat dissipation. If every point in space exploded simultaneously, not only would there be nowhere for the force to go, but there would be nowhere for the heat to dissipate too, either. The heat would be uniformly distributed throughout space, offering no possibility of cooling down and coalescing into denser states of matter. The pressure would also be infinite, with no gradient. Everything would simply be an ocean of gammawaves, with no room for expansion.
Sorry, I’m not a physicist, but the big bang happening everywhere at once isn’t up for debate. As far as I understand, it’s a well-settled fact. Read the article!
I don’t think anything in theoretical physics is well-settled fact.
Edit:
After a century of observations and theoretical advances, cosmologists can confidently state that the universe is infinite—or perhaps not. The question remains deeply complex. Current evidence suggests our expanding universe lacks both a center and edge, with the Big Bang occurring everywhere simultaneously rather than from a single point. Recent cosmic microwave background measurements indicate nearly flat geometry, supporting infinite extent theories, though alternative models proposing finite, curved space remain possible.
Yeah, nothing about that says “well-settled fact.” Quite the opposite. Either what you said is disinfo or you need to check your reading comprehension.
The idea is that the big bang started as a singularity, where everything had the same position as far as our 3d space is concerned, and then the difference in position arose as a consequence of it. Maybe space (as we know it) didn’t exist before, maybe it did but collapsed, or maybe there was “other” space but this space we’re in popped into existence. Same thing with time and perhaps some other dimensions.
So it did happen everywhere (where everywhere is just everywhere inside this universe), but it was a single point at that moment.
Though I suspect it was inside another universe and that our big bang singularity was just another black hole forming in that universe and we’re seeing the mystery of what happens beyond the event horizon when gravity overpowers all other forces. Our familiar forces could just be the next set of rules physics for small things (from the perspective of the parent universe) after gravity overcomes the dominant ones in that universe. Which could mean that all black holes are tunnels to other universes (that we can’t visit but the matter that makes us could, though it would probably be something else once it did, like an entire galaxy cluster).
Then the CMB might just be light that entered our universe from the parent one, redshifted like crazy (plus other optical gravitational effects, like any light that enters will appear brighter in one direction but coming from all directions to some extent).
That’s pretty cool sci-fi!
I’ma have to come back to that. Aware of the concept, but not have much driven to the core concept. Little too tired to read, but thanks friend
Theirs a good video on Startalk https://youtu.be/zGfIbEqDDLY
Did everyone forget about the galaxy? It’s also a giant circle, and the sun orbits it like we orbit the sun.
Perhaps the real question should be “Where is the Galaxy taking us?”
As far as I know we’re headed toward another galaxy. Luckily we’ll all by long gone by the time that collision happens.
“Where is the Galaxy taking us?”
Towards the andromeda galaxy which is over twice the size of the Milky Way. We are hurtling towards each other at about a quarter millions miles per hour.
For thousands of years after you die, that little fuzzy spot near Cassiopeia will slowly get larger and larger in the sky, and in about a four billion years, long after the Earth’s oceans have dried up and the sun is a giant, reddish monster hovering in the sky, and our magnetic field will have long since died out, our atmosphere will have been mostly stripped away and the weather will feel like being on the highest mountains in an oven, the night sky will be covered with a dazzling display of the Andromeda galaxy overhead, spiral arms visible with the naked eye stretching from horizon to horizon.
We will merge, in a series of passes through each other, with almost no stars actually colliding most likely, although a good number will be ejected into the emptiness of intergalactic space, and will finally settle into a new shape, and may trigger a new phase of star formation as new clouds of gas and dust collide and collapse in the new super-galaxy.
The Milky way and Andromeda may not collide.
Interesting article but it’s sad to see that website using dark patterns like subscribe popups and fucking with the back button.
But you’re still coming in to work, right?
Not if it’s Thursday. I work from home Thursday
Oh no you zoomed out to far and triggered the weird sensation. How bizarre it all is!! To know these things as little ape creatures. So small as to barely exist in a lake of space and an ocean of time. Whywhywhyhowwhyhowhowhow is any of this real???
You’re also made of 30-trillion little microscopic machines with vastly more complexity each than even the most fantastic clockwork we’ve ever devised, that are each working in harmony with each other, creating a vast machine that is continually breaking itself apart and rebuilding itself from parts of its environment as it moves through time and space.
And somehow you can breath either manually or automatically without breaking a stride.
So what you’re saying is, we’re all just REALLY good factorio runs
Knowing there’s no chance imaginable of being able to witness all this is so depressing… My death anxiety feeds on thoughts like this.
On the plus side, we live at a time where we can still observe the cosmic microwave background radiation and total solar eclipses.
Since the moon’s orbit grows by 3" every year, after a few million years it’ll be far enough away that it won’t completely eclipse the sun anymore.
And in a billion year’s time, the CMB will be redshifted so far into deep radio wavelengths that it’ll be impossible to observe
First thank you for filling in OP’s coverup of Mama’s intentions.
We will merge, in a series of passes through each other, with almost no stars actually colliding
So then, we’re just going for a ride to a farm upstate :(
Fun fact, we do not just orbit the galaxy in a circle, we also have a motion perpendicular to that circle. We oscillate up and down through the plane of the Milky Way. The Milky Way is super thin, like super ultra thin. If the Milky Way were a pancake, it would only be the thickness of a sheet of paper, a sad pancake indeed. However in terms of human scales it is still huge, so we have a large way to travel. Our galactic orbit is tilted as compared to the galactic plane, so throughout the cosmic year we move up and down as compared to the center. A motion of 100-200 light year, so pretty big. That orbit also has procession, so we move through different parts.
The galaxy itself is also moving, although at that scale it’s easier to think of the galaxy to be stationary and other galaxies moving towards or away from us. In general we are all moving towards a galaxy cluster known as “The Great Attractor” as it is the most massive (except for your mom).
It’s also often forgotten that our sun isn’t the only star moving in the galaxy. All of the stars orbit the galaxy in a lot of different orbits. And some don’t orbit at all, instead moving with escape velocity (or faster) to get flung outside of our galaxy. Some have their own orbit in companion dwarf galaxies that in turn orbit our own galaxy. It’s easy to think of a galaxy as a fixed thing, with all the stars in the same place moving together like on a disk. But this isn’t the case at all, stars aren’t bound together and can follow their own path. Over time their relative positions change and the constellations we know won’t exist anymore.
The structures we see in galaxies like spiral arms for example are only structures in the same way a wave in the ocean is a structure. It is clearly a thing that exists, with properties we can at least somewhat constrain (like size for example). But the water inside that wave is just water like everywhere else. At one point it’s part of the wave and then at some point it no longer is. It’s the same for stars, sometimes part of a structure, other times not (although it gets complicated quickly if you dig into the details)
That’s called a crepe and they are DELICIOUS.
Praise skycrepe
The galaxy is taking us to see its friend
Now do the local group and super clusters! The universe is wild!
And like all good mothers one day she will grow into a red giant, engulfing her children and obliterating all life on earth.
That is the true meaning of mothers day ❤️
I mean its kinda terrifying when you think about it from the perspective of someone who grew up in an abusive household
“You will never leave my control”
Either you get tossed to the curb by mom and you are cold and alone after being so used to the warmth and the plant is dead (flung out of orbit), or get murdered by her (red giant… engulf the system)
There’s a third option, but it may still lead to option 1 eventually. We invent starlifting, and keep our sun “young,” while also having the added benefit of strapping a solar thrusters to her so we can steer the solar system.
User name checks out
The fun stops when you find out about Sagittarius A.
Not necessarily. I like to think I’m pretty resilient.
It’s my understanding that the specific direction on this relative motion graphic is just made-up, but it does do a good job of reminding people that we’re orbiting the galactic center.
I’d love to know what the actual direction currently looks like though
AFAIK, the problem is that we don’t even know with certsinty the shape of the universe. Let alone find out anything outside our own cosmos…
The sun is not a sweet mother, he is armed with the great serpent Xiuhcoatl and demands the hearts of our enemies.
Warp 11?
That’s not Mama, that’s our son!
To saggitariusA
I don’t want to go there. I heard it sucks
Unfortunately, you’re not driving
