MONSTER GALAXY spotted hiding behind IMMENSE BLACK HOLE

Re: Just so I understand this right...

I would guess that any temporal effect there might be on a photon when it zips past a 100,000ly galaxy is going to be pretty insignificant in comparison to a) those 100,000 years and b) the 11,000,000,000 years of the rest of its journey.

Re: Just so I understand this right...

ok, let's try it again .... that galaxy is big but far away ....

Re: Just so I understand this right...

Temporal compression does not happen. Llight traverses paths that are bent relative to an euclidean space that one would naively extend through the "massive" region.

But even so...

11.7 billion light years - that is so mind bogglingly difficult to comprehend.

Bollocks to what the religious people think and scientists can't say anything unless there is pure evidence, but there _has_ to be other life in this universe, it being so huge.

Re: Minor correction

"SDP.81 is an enormous galaxy" should really be "SDP.81 was an enormous galaxy 11.7 billion ago".

For most purposes the distinction is meaningless. Simultaneity over distances where C is a dominating factor has no useful meaning: if no event "there" can have any effect "here" for 11.7 by, then whether something there happened 11.7 bya rather than "now" has no material consequences. It's sometimes an important point when considering the consistency of the physical model (for example, to keep causality intact in that model), but generally it's just a philosophical fillip.

Absolutely correct. Photons are the handshakes of Minkovsky space.

Re: Any sign of MH370 back there?

What

Cynic, I'm sure you are just joshing us, but for the benefit of less informed readers, 1" means 1 arc-second.

Re: Pixels?

In astronomy the resolution is called resolving power and is dependent not on the number of pixels of your sensor (which is a radio antenna) but on the diameter of your telescope relative to the wavelength you are observing and the funny thing is an array of telescopes can be treated as one big telescope. They all look at the same patch of sky and some fancy electronics/computing does the aiming/image reconstruction. Look up Inteferometry.

Re: Our location...

Everywhere is "the middle" to all observers since spacetime is expanding for everyone is all directions.

Re: Our location...

(Not sure if that's a sincere question or a joke...)

By definition, we're exactly in the middle of our Hubble Volume, which is the same as the knowable universe. Whatever we find out about the knowable universe becomes part of the "known universe".

And nothing we do can ever have an effect outside our Hubble Volume, so "knowable universe" is a suitable proxy for "entire universe" for nearly all purposes.

That's one possible answer to the question of "where are we in the universe"?

Another interpretation is "given what we believe we know about the universe, or think is the most plausible among various theories, how are we situated among much-larger-scale structures"? I don't really follow the field, but the latest I've seen is that the Milky Way is part of a galactic supercluster astrophysicists call "Laniakea", which is really quite large, and that is part of a larger arrangement of superclusters that's so big that "where are we inside it" isn't meaningful.