this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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Black hole cosmology suggests that the Milky Way and every other observable galaxy in our universe is contained within a black hole that formed in another, much larger, universe.

The theory challenges many fundamental models of the cosmos, including the idea that the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe.

It also provides the possibility that black holes within our own universe may be the boundaries to other universes, opening up a potential scenario for a multiverse.

Mine blown 🀯

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[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 153 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Using data from Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope, researchers at Kansas State University in the US discovered that the majority of the galaxies were rotating in the same direction.

This goes against previous assumptions that our universe is isotropic, meaning there should be an equal number of galaxies rotating clockwise and anticlockwise.

β€œIt is not clear what causes this to happen, but there are two primary possible explanations,” said Lior Shamir, associate professor of computer science at Kansas State University.

β€œOne explanation is that the universe was born rotating. That explanation agrees with theories such as black hole cosmology, which postulates that the entire universe is the interior of a black hole.”

yeah it's just the most headline grabbing possibility

[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 258 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

Dude, after reading the paper from start to finish, this whole thing seems off.

  • The guy's an associate professor of computer science and has no degree in cosmology, but he's talking about cosmological implications of these findings.
  • Every single paper cited supporting his argument was written by himself (in exactly one case, it was written by himself and a coauthor). In total, Shamir cites himself ~~106~~ 130 times.
  • Numerous other papers by numerous other authors (some mentioned by this paper in attempted rebuttals) using a variety of methodologies find this not to be the case.
  • It violates the cosmological principle used by major and highly successful models of the universe.
  • The way he performed this analysis was an algorithm which he wrote. When he cites papers that have used this algorithm, he only cites himself, indicating no other academic in the world has thought this algorithm is seriously useful for this application.
  • When speaking to The Independent (which is of really middling quality), instead of speaking about the data itself and how he arrived at it, he (again with no formal background in cosmology) starts talking about the most clickbaity possible implications of this data.

It's totally possible Shamir is right and that there really is a massive bias. That would be extremely cool. However, he's published numerous papers on this over the last decade yet still seems to be the only one who agrees with it. Which to me is highly unusual.

[–] Cyv_@lemmy.blahaj.zone 90 points 1 week ago

Can I just say your thoroughness here is a real fucking impressive skill. Thank you for sharing.

[–] Balthazar@lemmy.world 61 points 1 week ago

This guy reads.

[–] Leeuk@feddit.uk 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thanks for breaking that down, I wish newspapers or even BBC News did this. They do now have BBC Verify but its never super clear of their findings, certainly not in the format that you've just used. Perhaps theirs should be called BBC Balance. The only thing I would say with regard to your first point is that I'm not against the idea that any individual could make a breakthrough. At least with regard to theory.

We already know that throughout the history of cosmology, whole experts have been wrong when a new discovery is made. E.g. Highly likely that not everyone believed that Earth was centre of the Universe (like the earlier science communities claimed). The issue with this guy is he's using his own biased ideas and data and some people believe whatever is printed in a newspaper must be right.

Only silver lining is at least there clickbaity headlines give the public something more substantial to think about for 60 seconds instead of what the next Kardashian is up to...

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[–] FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

@Bitswap@lemmy.world (moderator), can we have a rule about clickbait headlines.

I’m kind of getting sick of these pop-science articles that exagerrate everything times 1000x in the headline. In any other discipline that kind of hyperbole would be considered a lie.

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[–] Joeffect@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I have always wondered about this and it's always been the question I would want to ask neil degrasse tyson about if I ever met him... I never realized there was a term for it or even other people believed it...

My other crazy theory is that we are always in a state of jumping between realities... As a state of self preservation... We exist in the reality where we keep living. With the possibility of realities being infinite and the possibility of a subset of those infinites being basically the same as the one you're in...

Who knows maybe it's just a reassuring way to be happy knowing that one day your actually going to die instead of all those times you have felt like you have almost died being truly a time you have died...

[–] ech@lemm.ee 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

As I understand it, the idea of Quantum Immortality is a bit more nuanced then that. It's not that you would be "jumping between realities". It's more-so that, as the reality where you are alive is the only one you can possibly be aware of, any reality where you would die simply wouldn't be seen by you. The splits where the potential to die exist would only be seen as "close calls" to the consciousness that is you. It's more so a resolution of logic than a cross-dimensional mind swap. A pop-culture example of this is sort of seen in

Movie nameThe Prestige.

Extra Major plot spoilerQuick summary - in the movie, Hugh Jackman's character gets access to a machine that instantly duplicates him, which he uses for his magic shows. To resolve the "small" issue of there being an ever multiplying amount of him, he has a mechanism to immediately drown the version of him on stage when they disappear as the other version reveals himself elsewhere in the theater. At one point, he talks about how he was always terrified that he would be the one being drowned. There's a few interesting things about this particular line, the most pertinent one being that he is never the version that gets drowned, evident from the fact he is talking about it. Obviously this is just fiction, but I think it's a good illustration of the concept. There are also a lot of details left nebulous, possible details of which could suggest Destructive Teleportation instead.

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[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Our consciousness continuously transferring between realities to stay alive is kinda crazy ngl

What's the big question you've always wondered about though? It's not clear from your comment

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[–] BB84@mander.xyz 56 points 1 week ago

I recommend critically reading the paper. It is quite accessible to those with college-level science background.

Most importantly, it is still highly controversial whether this galaxy rotation direction bias actually exists. If you look at section 4 of the paper, the author is debating against different groups that did similar surveys and found no bias. Someone needs to actually work through this author's methodology as well as those of other groups and figure out what is going on.

If there is indeed a bias, that is super exciting! An anisotropic universe due to being in a black hole would be a very cool explanation. But given the ongoing debate, a general-audience publication like Independent presenting this rotation bias as a given fact is very poor journalism.

[–] nulluser@lemmy.world 43 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Last few paragraphs...

Shamir noted that an alternative explanation for why most of the galaxies in the study rotate clockwise is that the Milky Way’s rotational velocity is having an impact on the measurements.

β€œIf that is indeed the case, we will need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe,” said Shamir.

"The re-calibration of distance measurements can also explain several other unsolved questions in cosmology such as the differences in the expansion rates of the universe and the large galaxies that according to the existing distance measurements are expected to be older than the universe itself.”

That's leading me to think that that's actually the more probable explanation, and the black hole idea comes in a distant second in terms of probability, but is much more attention grabbing/sensational/click-baity.

[–] CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago (3 children)

The black hole idea is actually weirdly solid, its a case of the maths says we definetaly should be but observation and just intuition says its crazy. If you consider the event horizon to be the surface of a volume, black holes get less dense as their radius increases, you can have a black hole with the same density as rock, water, air, even the miniscule density of the gas in a vacuum, so long as teh black hole is large enough. The average density of the observable universe is higher than the density of a black hole the size of the observable universe so technically we should be in one.

Technically this doesn't have to affect anything, larger black holes can have gentler gravity gradients and nothing in physics actually demands all the mass inside be concentrated at a miniscule central point, it just works out that way for black holes of the size we've seen so far. So the entire universe could be a black hole (assuming its finite) with the event horizon just being functionally inacessable and the black hole so large that internal conditions aren't really influenced in any way.

[–] Soggy@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago

Surely at some point it stops being useful to apply the same terminology to such vastly different concepts. If the universe is a black hole and Sagittarius A* is a black hole then "black hole" doesn't communicate anything effectively outside of extremely niche astrophysics conversations.

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[–] Boxscape@lemmy.sdf.org 25 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)
[–] foggy@lemmy.world 25 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I've kinda thought that were some n-dimension universe getting sucked into an n-dimension black hole, and what happens as that universe crosses the event horizon is the big bang, the arrow of time. And all of the matter and forces that have them appearing to interact is just some beautiful n-dimension spaghettification.

The universe isn't expanding; all mafter within it is shrinking, being crushed. all matter appears to be accelerating further and further away because, well, it is. From our perspective.

Think of our whole universe as the most epic allegory of the cave possible.

I'll go back to ripping my bong now.

[–] Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

If this is true, do you think time exists outside the outer black hole? In the least, I might imagine it's moving very differently than our interior universe.

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[–] Actionschnils@feddit.org 20 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The Frensh-German TV-Channel Arte published a Documentary about the theorem, that we are probably living in a black hole. According to them its based on the work of Nikodem Poplawski (mathematician and physicist). It was a kinda nice theory and seemed appealing. But Im no scientist and I have no idea about higher Math and Physics. Sadly, on the German Arte-TV-Site the video is not avaible anymore. (According to German Law public-TV-Channels arent allowed to keep their Videos up online unlimited) https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/101940-002-A/leben-wir-in-einem-schwarzen-loch/

But I assume there are other sources, probably even in other languages.

[–] jerkface@lemmy.ca 19 points 1 week ago

if you can call that living

[–] ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 1 week ago

Oh sure but when I say this I'm "too high" and need to "quit smoking." I been told y'all.

[–] Fuhgeddaboutit@sopuli.xyz 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)
[–] spicebag@lemm.ee 13 points 1 week ago

There's debate on the existence of singularities and certain shapes of the universe can give the impression of accelerating expansion

[–] Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 week ago

Well, they still have a mass (and some form of "size") iirc, that can expand as they absorb things

[–] Bbbbbbbbbbb@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago
[–] samus12345@lemm.ee 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

the idea that the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe

I always thought this was the consensus, but turns out, it was just as far back as we can go where physics as we know it work. Not everyone claimed that nothing existed before.

[–] lunarul@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago (6 children)

nothing existed before

Thing is that there's no "before", because time itself started with the big bang. The questions to ask are: is there anything other than our universe, and does that even matter? If nothing can get in or out of our universe, then there's no way to prove the existence of anything outside of it and there's zero impact one way or another.

[–] samus12345@lemm.ee 5 points 1 week ago

Time as we know it started. That doesn't mean time as we don't know it wasn't around.

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[–] ramenshaman@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago
[–] Randomgal@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 week ago

Chat is this real?

[–] Agent641@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago

Bruh I'm just trying to get through the workday I don't need this on my mind!

[–] doingthestuff@lemy.lol 8 points 1 week ago

I honestly appreciate that we don't understand the universe. Theories keep evolving and that's what science should look like. If we can't question "established" scientific theories, we have abandoned the scientific method. Strong theories hold up. Like the theory of gravity, although even there I'm not convinced we have a complete understanding. Good answers are good, but who knows what we might be capable of if we keep pushing for more.

[–] iAvicenna@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

much larger universe than this? are you fucking kidding? we might just as well die then.

[–] ivanafterall@lemmy.world 27 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Or you might just as well live given the absurdity of it all.

[–] madcaesar@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You both make excellent points!

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[–] niktemadur@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

we might just as well die

Because it's not what you expected?
I can assure you, whatever you expected is just as strange and absurd as this.

Let me put this in another way:
To think that time might have not existed, then started up at some point, breaks my brain.
To think that time might go on for infinity in the past, with no starting point, also breaks my brain.

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Man, this is so cool!!

I like these observations and theories, despite them being the ramblings of very ignorant creatures (all of us as a species).

This said, we don't have evidence to suggest we aren't the most intelligent creatures to ever exist. It seems very, very unlikely... But, such is the rarity of life so far as we've observed.

So... These are lots of fun! If not for any other reason, than for the reason of humbling us all.

[–] Spacehooks@reddthat.com 4 points 1 week ago

Explains the warped timeline

[–] ABetterTomorrow@lemm.ee 4 points 1 week ago

The way things are going, more like we got tossed in an endless trash can. I don’t blame the Vulcans.

[–] TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 4 points 1 week ago

black holes all the way down?

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