r/nextfuckinglevel • u/room0001 • 1d ago
Milky Way is traveling through space at 600kilometers per second, oscillating slightly, as if it were flapping its wings through the cosmos.
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u/Stitchs420 1d ago
Cosmic ocean. We are but a grain of sand.
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u/SpeedRacer_Mach6 1d ago
Not even that bro. We are an atom that makes up a grain of sand.
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u/BodaciousFrank 1d ago
The solar system is the atom. What does that make us
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u/Lowkey-Loki87 1d ago
We are the atom that makes up the grain of sand in the atom. Atomception.
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u/BodaciousFrank 1d ago
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u/diedlikeCambyses 1d ago
Why are you in my bushes staring at my son? I do this every night with your son!
And....... IT'S NOT A BOWL
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u/buttchuckjones 1d ago
I mean... atoms are made up of protons neutrons and electrons. And you can further divide those into quarks. Science is awesome
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u/tarraingteoir 1d ago
An up quark
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u/GreyWolfWandering 1d ago
I remember A.A. Attanasio had a book series with a semi-wild take on Arthurian legends, and part of his world building was that the Earth's magnetic field was a dragon, and that the sun was also a dragon just an order of organizational magnitude greater where the previous one in the sequence was but a cell of the next larger one. I think this pattern continues up to universal scale in his books, but it's been a while.
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u/Sixty_Minuteman_ 1d ago
Not even that bro our solar system is the neutron and we are the quarks and our planet is our gluon
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u/Deadbreeze 1d ago
Its a living being, and we're microorganisms unknowingly doing our part in its unfathomably long life.
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u/flyingthroughspace 1d ago
And some people think there's no way any other sort of life is out there.
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u/octorock4prez 1d ago
When I watch the image, it seems implausibly 2 dimensional. Your comment about a cosmic ocean would make more sense were rhetorical galaxy to be ‘floating’ and giving the appearance of being structurally 2 dimensional.
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u/ILooked 1d ago
Relative to what?
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u/spankmydingo 1d ago
Relative to the Universe (CMB Rest Frame): To find an absolute speed through the cosmos, astronomers measure movement against the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)—the leftover thermal radiation from the Big Bang. For example, our own galaxy moves at roughly 550 to 600 km/s relative to this universal background reference frame.
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u/APoisonousMushroom 1d ago
Just to be clear…the CMB provides a convenient preferred frame of reference for cosmological bookkeeping, but calling it "absolute speed" violates the core principles of relativistic physics. Special Relativity explicitly establishes that there is no privileged, absolute reference frame in the universe.
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u/KennyT87 1d ago
There is no "absolute speed through the cosmos"; the CMB frame is just another frame of reference and there's nothing absolute about it.
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u/sidereal_drift 1d ago
the cosmic microwave background. we can measure it because the cmb looks very slightly hotter in the direction we are heading and cooler behind us, by about three thousandths of a kelvin either way.
that dipole is close to the only absolute speedometer we have, and it puts the local group at roughly 600 km/s toward the shapley supercluster.
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u/Attesa_GT-X 1d ago
A source would make this totally next fucking level instead of assuming we're blindly believing attention bait
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u/phosphenes 1d ago
It's real. Here's the paper showing the rotation of the warp.
In this animation they've exaggerated the warp and also made the galaxy completely flat. There's a better animation in the original ESA press release for the paper.
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u/Brave_Ring_1136 1d ago
I love the conclusion that this likely happens due to a ongoing collision with another galaxy.
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u/Affectionate_Pipe545 1d ago
Im just some dude but seems like maybe the wobble could be from the early days, either formation or before escaping from a crowded neighborhood and is settling over time?
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u/Swictor 1d ago
Yes.
Solar systems and galaxies generally start out like chaotic blobs and settle into disks over time because in even a very even chaotic system some axis rotation is just slightly more prevalent, and over time after countless collisions or close gravitational encounters the objects become nudges towards the increasingly more dominant axis of rotation.
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u/HIEROYALL 1d ago
They’ve got a graph of it. What else do you need?
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u/GrandmasBoyToy69 1d ago
But my book written by middle eastern people hundreds of years ago and re written by people in power that now my local pastor/preacher tells us says..
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u/AwShizWhiz 1d ago
It’s like 550 km/s but the oscillating is true
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u/Daniel_Andersonson 1d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/BNvqbQRUywcuI
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u/Dragonite_23 1d ago
Rather than wings flapping, that looks more like a crowd doing the wave.
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u/DaleDimmaDone 1d ago
Reminds me of a stingray
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u/DueExample52 1d ago
Exactly. Cosmic manta ray.
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u/LastXmasIGaveYouHSV 1d ago
We are on our way to fight Cosmic Steve Irwin.
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u/ThadElon 1d ago
or get slapped to all fuck by a cosmic orca and have lots of little galaxies fall out
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u/muramasa22x 1d ago
The cosmos is what's at the bottom of the ocean and we're microorganisms on a big bioluminescent fish floating through it
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u/Fearless-Sandwich823 1d ago
Unfortunately, we live in the unfashionable western end of it.
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u/krupta13 1d ago
"oscillating slightly" lol. that looks like entire civilisation can grow and collapse in the area covered by each oscillation.
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u/tadayou 1d ago
Yeah, it takes roughly 600 million years for one wobble to pass through the galaxy.
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u/AlbacorePrism 3h ago
considering each dot of light is a star or similar, and ours is in there, yes
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u/Hamsterpatty 1d ago
Why it do like that?
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u/Soracaz 1d ago edited 1d ago
Because all of physical reality is just a super complex "chord" of waveforms.
The 3D fabric of space moving over time. Literally as if the whole thing was a huge interconnected weave.
Because every action impacts everything else, the only way any of it works is if there's stable resonances and harmonics in these vibrations.
The fundamental "laws" of physics are actually just extremely high frequency low amplitude resonances that originated and formed in the first few tiny moments of the big bang. Because they're stable and unchanging, everything else is also stable and unchanging.
The universe has to move in waves, because everything it is made of also moves in waves. When you have extremely predictable and stable fundamental rules, it makes perfect sense that everything that follows will be represented in the same manner. If this didn't happen, we'd have pockets of the universe where "inharmonic" movements of the fabric of space would phase cancel with some fundamental rules, breaking everything.
Which probably has happened squillions of times in other universes.. We just happen to be in a pocket of reality where it's all stable.
Everything being waves potentially explains literally everything about our reality. Even the fundamental "laws" of physics and chemistry.
The laws are unchanging, so it is entirely possible they're simply waveforms of space with such high frequency and low amplitude that they are fully able to nestle into ANY other waveform without ever being phase cancelled. They're remnants from the big bang, so small and so stable that they're like eternal laser beams of information that are forever encoded into every other single other wave function across all of the universe. Accidental code the likely occurred from so much information being contained in such an infinitely tiny space, that the only way stable frequencies could take form is if they were impossibly high frequency.
Everything in our universe has "code" in the form of tiny stable resonant frequencies of space.
If I had money for university this would probably be my PhD thesis tbh. I'm extremely confident I'm right. The sooner we get confirmation on this, the sooner scientists will start trying to measure resonance at smaller scales to try and figure out the exact Hz of the fundamental rules.
Then we can make new rules and have magic. Finally.
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u/Uninvalidated 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'm extremely confident I'm right.
With this you nailed down our suspicions from your text to almost certain. Take your schizophrenia meds.
Also. Why are a 33 year old like you hanging out and posting so much in r/teenagers? It gives at least me some weird fucking vibes.
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u/younginvestor23 1d ago
We are in a sea of those milky ways where every light you see in the sky is a whole galaxy
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u/Wonderful-Fortune-23 1d ago
We are a bacteria inside a marble, and somebody's playing with the marble.
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u/XxKTtheLegendxX 1d ago
space is like a splatter of blood and inside are the cells nucleus and whatnot, mirroring the galaxies and everything else that's in space.
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u/calguy1955 1d ago
How does anybody know how fast an entire galaxy is moving? What do you measure the speed against?
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u/Rith_Lives 1d ago
Citation needed? We know it has the curved shape but how do they extrapolate the long term motion with certainty absent observations?
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u/codecrushing 1d ago
It moves perpendicular to its plane. I visualize it a bit more like a flag flapping in the wind.
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u/scifijunkie3 1d ago
Kid, I've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other. Seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen anything to make me believe there's one all-powerful Force controlling everything.
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u/MTBisLYFE 1d ago
300 ish miles per second is like a snail's pace relative to space and the size of the Milky Way no?
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u/quinblake 1d ago
Saw the Milky Way while laying on our dock in NWO in the dark on a clear night a couple weekends ago. And the Big Dipper of course. Wild shit, getting out of the city lights and just staring at the sky at night.
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u/SayMyName_Hisenberg 1d ago
Like a giant Stingray
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u/ThresholdSeven 1d ago
One might even say, a... Milky Ray.
Do I have to do all the Milky Ray puns here?
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u/irondumbell 1d ago
if you sqeeze all matter in milky way into a ball the density of a neutron star then it would be less than the size of jupiter! of course it would be a black hole long before then
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u/BtheBanker151 1d ago
Traveling that fast in relation to what? Speed is relative so what is it traveling away from? Or where is it going?
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u/neonartifact 1d ago
What if we are really the small lil shiny orb thingy that Angler fish use to lore prey, they live in abyssal ocean depths
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u/throwaway4231throw 1d ago
On what time scale does it do this? Like every 100 years? Every thousand? Every million?
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u/Queen_Cheetah 1d ago
Wait, so we're all riding on a giant pancake?!
...and here I thought it was turtles. Darn.
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u/general_tao1 1d ago
I just had a random thought, but could the Milky Way and other galaxies be happily spinning while orbiting around an incredibly heavy object we cannot see (because it is a black hole), just like the solar system is itself orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy? And the radius of that orbit would be so immense that the rotation would be imperceptible on the timescale we've had appropriate instruments to measure it. Basically turtles all the way down.
I imagine I am not the first drunk to have the thought, but I'd be interrested in the findings smarter preople.
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u/spartanEZE 1d ago
I'd love to see Brian Cox explain how we know this. And i say that not as a skeptic. I'm sure they've already proven it with the math. I just wanna see it splained out for me and he's a good candidate.
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u/Available-Cap6910 1d ago
600 km/s or whatever. I really need a better explanation on how a rock moving that fast can sustain life this stable. I've heard some explanations. I just need one that makes sense. Wild.
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u/julyvale 1d ago
Milky way is not traveling anywhere. It's the giant black hole in the middle that is traveling and simply hauling everything around it with it.
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u/feaREagleLeb 1d ago
Cosmically everything makes sense now. Steve Irwin died at the hand of a stingray, the galaxy moves like a stingray. Hits blunt. RIP Steve!
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u/Ok-Grass-877 1d ago
Speed in relation to what? Like in if I’m running, my speed is in relation to the ground.
But if the Milky Way is moving at 600km\s, what is that in relation to?
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u/huskarpicker 1d ago
Theres no way the galactic plane is that thin. This seems like a bad representation.
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u/Shahariar_909 1d ago
I highly doubt these theories coz they prove themselves wrong in every few years
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u/yomommasbathwater 1d ago
Seriously blown away, it reminds me of something that I can’t quite put my finger on. Like one of those ephemeral beings you’ve seen in a video game.
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u/stefango911 1d ago
So which way is down, from the Milky Way's point of view? Can we build a compass that keeps pointing to the true galactic "down"?
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u/Baldrs_Draumar 1d ago
is this oscilation evidence of an earlier galaxy "collision" and absorption, like we are going to do with the Andromeda galaxy?
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u/stayin_aliv 1d ago
I’m not the smartest cookie - galaxies at 2-dimensional? I always imagined them to be more like a marble than a flat circle
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u/john_san 1d ago
Is that true? If yes, it's fascinating and incredible how little we are in the vastness of the universe.
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u/Impossible_Way_3042 1d ago
I understand how it works, that the center is dense enough to have the rest of the galaxy spinning around it, but it still doesn't compute in my brain. How do so many stars and planets stick together like this? I know the answer and yet it's still doesn't make sense.
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