Based purely on the thumbnail image alone I'm going to assume it was located in the "Cocknballs Nebula".
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
54 points (96.6% liked)
Science
16479 readers
69 users here now
Subscribe to see new publications and popular science coverage of current research on your homepage
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
Can't believe astronomers missed the shaft
"Gotta honor the cock." —D20
A bridge, you say? Then we can cross to other galaxies! Our overpopulation problems are solved!
On a more serious note, I wonder how much this would increase our ability to cross the gulfs. Assuming we could eventually build machines that can endure for hundreds of thousands of years, would the presence of a gas bridge would make ramscoops a more viable intergalactic option?
Stuff lasting that long? Capitalism will never allow it!
"This is Joe from Amazon Hyperdrives, I'm calling about your centennial warranty renewal."
The future is NOW...NOw...Now...now...~now...~^now...^
Imagine cashing in on a 100k year voyage which will only probably go wrong 10k-99.9k years after you die. Easy money for a capitalist, even if it involves making a vessel that can last that long
...for those distances we're talking hundreds of millions of years at relativistic velocities, even billions...
The Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy is only 25,000 ly from Earth. Assuming constant acceleration, and sufficient technology to protect and keep things running for all that time - no mean feat - reaching a substantial percentage of light should make that reachable within a hundred or so thousand light years, even with a flip and slow-down halfway.
Seque 1 is only 75k ly.
Andromeda is much farther; I didn't catch it in the article, but I got the impression the strands were identified between the more local clusters.
...satellite galaxies != galaxy clusters; andromedia is 2.5 million light-years distant and the cluster in this study is about ten times that size, 23 million light-years across...
Well, there go my vacation plans.
Wouldn't the ship itself perceive a lot less of that time compared to an external point of reference?
...that's correct: i assumed 0.01c and didn't adjust for time dilation, which can drastically affect the calculations depending upon how far we push relativistic super-science, although the required energies are commensurately absurd...
And then they used the word "could" which made it all meaningless blather and conjecture. Science for likes and clicks, who needs a fuckin' hypothesis, amirite?
who needs a fuckin’ hypothesis
everyone. Its how theories are formed,
but yes science journalism is shitty and intentionally fails,0 to indicate the difference between an idea, hypothesis and theory. Just to gain clicks.
Well, it's not a simple page with science journalism, it's the official page of the European Space Agency (ESA), not TikToc or YouTube. It's certainly a hypothesis, but for sure it's not something that cannot be taken seriously.
It’s like when we discovered the lymphatic system in the body, basically invisible while being critically important
Between the couch cushions again