baconbrand 6 hours ago

I have nothing but admiration for people who can study space and not melt down into a permanent existential crisis.

This is cool as heck, and now I’m going to go back to my computer job and try not to think about how ridiculously tiny and fragile my little life is.

  • dylan604 5 hours ago

    It's actually one of the things I enjoy about it. It is a reminder of just how unimportant we actually are. All of the rat races and stress and worry we endure and/or put ourselves through is ultimately for nothing. Since it doesn't matter anyways, might as well live it in the most free and self fulfilling way one can.

    • smokel 3 hours ago

      Whether something is important or unimportant is something that only humans, and possibly some animals, and possibly some AI, can reason about. Most of the universe does not reason, and does not think that things are important or not.

      Importance is a local concept, and it can be quite relevant locally.

      • alcover an hour ago

        I agree so much. For all we know yet, there's nothing out there. Nothing conscious or even sentient. So our lives and the life on earth are infinitely important.

        I never understood this `we're but a speck`. Do you know of many other specks with life ?

        • dylan604 40 minutes ago

          The universe has been around long before humans existed, and it will be here long after humans no longer exist. If humans are the best the universe has, then that's just a sad bit of commentary. Not understanding the but a speck is just denying fact. We may be the only speck with life, but we're just a speck with life. If the life on this speck was able to hop from speck to speck and utilize all of the universe, we could have a conversation.

        • objektif an hour ago

          How does existence of life outside Earth (or lack of it) change importance of our life in the grand scheme of things?

          • alcover 31 minutes ago

            It's important because we seem to be the only (visible) thing that can scheme.

      • dylan604 2 hours ago

        Fine. s/important/significant/ or any other word you feel befitting.

    • spoiler 2 hours ago

      This attitude is referred to as optimistic nihilism, if anyone wants to look more into it.

      I've been trying to adopt this mindset myself in recent years.

      It's helped me "cope" and accept certain things about my life. It's not how my mind developed initially, so it doesn't come naturally to me and I sometimes fall into old habits. So, sometimes I need to remind myself to practice it.

      Anyway, thanks for the reminder! :)

    • hnuser123456 4 hours ago

      Yep. Plus, with the Rubin telescope online, we have a pretty high resolution and high frequency scan of the solar system where we could detect anything that could hurt us pretty far out, probably even wandering black holes.

  • Keyframe 4 hours ago

    It kind of became a daily obsession of mine recently, the question being - how can we NOT study space and what's around us as almost the main thing? I kind of regret not going that direction when I was in my 20s.

  • cvoss 4 hours ago

    In some sense, our small size with respect to astronomical-scale processes does not make us all that fragile, because we are also very short-lived with respect to these things.

    Afraid of the impending collision of Andromeda with the Milky Way? Not to worry. Life as we know will be gone by then. Huge processes like galactic mergers are "in slow motion" relative to our every day processes due to light speed bounds. The time they take to occur is enormous because the distances involved are enormous. In a cool way, the presence and influence of an astronomical object is just as insignificant to our processes as the presence and influence of one electron, and for the same reason: enormous difference of scale. The big stuff is no more scary than the small stuff.

    • XorNot 3 hours ago

      Reminds me of my favorite writing prompt that was so good it was it's own story too:

      "It’s been publicly confirmed that our galaxy is within the open maw of a massive galaxy-eating beast. The beast can’t move faster than light, so it’ll take hundreds of millions of years for it to finally bite down. This is something that humans will just have to live with"

      (I don't think you can actually tell a good story with this, it's a background detail you would put in some other story).

  • VTimofeenko 6 hours ago

    I wonder if it's similar to how mefical doctors feel about their jobs. It's gotta turn into a bit of a routine, otherwise they will just spend time in that existential crisis and not get anything done.

    > This is cool as heck, and now I’m going to go back to my computer job and try not to think about how ridiculously tiny and fragile my little life is.

    There could be an alternative take here: we really lucked out that life as we know it exists at all. So we kinda won the lottery already.

    • kakacik 4 hours ago

      Some form of life is probably quite common given the scale of entire universe, amino acids could be found in space for example coming from pre-solar times. If you understand what I just wrote you have to accept above as fact.

      Now there are fuck tonne of filters we passed so far, may very well fail on next one (probably self-destruction), and we are lucky with so far stable good place for life. Given there are billions of trillions of planets, no way we are on the very top of that ridiculous number.

      We may be one of the earlier civs but no way we are first neither. But how we would recognize a civilization that has say just a 1 billion years headstart? Dyson spheres are for fools ignoring dark forest stuff, not something really smart cautious beings would do. Matter holds enormous amount of energy, and there are other ways to extract it in a less obvious ways, ie black holes or probably some other ways.

      Look at it this way - we are maybe building a small baby steps for one of big civilizations of universe. Still extremely primitive in all possible ways while arrogant enough to mostly not see it, but there is potential for true greatness. Otherwise we will perish, I dont see anything in between.

  • gigatexal 5 hours ago

    Same. As soon as I really let myself consider how vast, empty, desolate empty space is and then imagine myself floating in it with no reference and unable to tell if I am up or down or going anywhere ... I get all sorts of dread.

    That being said... I'd love to if I were terminally ill yet capable enough to understand what was happening -- to be yeeted into a super super massive blackhole that was not feeding such that I would not be torn to shreds or vaporized by the accretion disk and ultimately understand what lies at the center of my now time horizon...

    • butlike 5 hours ago

      You're in good company with the atoms in your fingernail, I'm sure :)

    • WaxProlix 5 hours ago

      Tidal forces would still shred and disfigured you horrifically well before the event horizon. The term is literally 'spagghetification'

      • pixl97 5 hours ago

        Depends on the size of the black hole. Small black holes, yes you get shredded. Supermassive black holes maybe not. Of course the rotation of the black hole may have a different idea about that.

        • gigatexal an hour ago

          exactly. I am thinking hyper massive -- super duper massive ones where I could ostensibly be falling for minutes? days? towards the end of time... what bliss

  • pseudosavant 5 hours ago

    Same. The scales that the universe operates on (distance, time, mass/energy, etc) make the human experience so infinitely small as to be nearly nothing. Yet, here we are. Pondering our own existence.

  • HPsquared 6 hours ago

    Conversely, people who study microscopic phenomena might end up with gigantic inflated egos. "Lord of the atoms"

    • dgfl 5 hours ago

      It’s our job. It’s mundane. It’s only cool again when you step back for these kind of publications, or when you go to a conference and you see a bunch of adjacent (and importantly, completed) work. 99% of the time we look at a screen / piece of paper / whiteboard.

  • malux85 4 hours ago

    If something that is true scares you, you should think about it and look at it, in little bits, until it doesn’t.

    Accept your fragility, be grateful for what the universe gives you, be humble about your limits and faults, and spread happiness, joy and love to the other fragile, limited beings around you. There’s your cure for existential dread.

layer8 7 hours ago

Actual paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-025-02651-2

From the abstract: “This is the lowest-mass object known to us, by two orders of magnitude, to be detected at a cosmological distance by its gravitational effect. This work demonstrates the observational feasibility of using gravitational imaging to probe the million-solar-mass regime far beyond our local Universe.”

  • blamestross 7 hours ago

    And when you are trying out a new imaging method, the selection bias for "long tail weird stuff" that shows up is pretty high.

    Assuming this is repeatable, it will take a while to contextualize.

sixo 8 hours ago

Can someone knowledgeable weigh in: is the "dark object" here believed to be a localized blob of dark matter? A dark star or black hole? Or is "dark" being used generally to mean "not bright enough to see at this distance"?

  • burnerRhodov2 7 hours ago

    In this context, “dark object” really does mean a localized blob of dark matter, not a black hole or a dim, normal-matter object.

    The research team detected it only through its gravitational lensing effect — the way it slightly distorted the light from a more distant galaxy. There’s no emission at any wavelength (optical, infrared, or radio), and its gravitational signature matches a million-solar-mass clump of invisible mass rather than a compact point source like a black hole.

    They specifically interpret it as a dark matter subhalo — one of the small, dense lumps that simulations of “cold dark matter” predict should pepper the universe’s larger halos. It’s too massive to be a single star, far too diffuse to be a stellar remnant, and not luminous enough to be a faint galaxy.

    So “dark” here isn’t just shorthand for “too dim to see at this distance” — it’s used in the literal physical sense: matter that doesn’t emit or absorb light at all, detectable only via gravity.

    Eventually, all the dark matter clumps into rings around galaxies, but since this one is so distant, ~10B light years, so we are seeing that clump as it was that long ago before it difused into it's ring shape we can see in the galaxies around us.

    • hermitcrab 4 hours ago

      Why does dark matter form halos/rings around galaxies. Why isn't it attracted to the centre of the galaxy like 'normal' matter?

      • marcosdumay 4 hours ago

        It is attracted to the center of the galaxy.

        Normal matter also makes halos or rings around the center of the galaxy. That's how gravity works. And since dark matter interacts less, it stays more spread.

        • hermitcrab 3 hours ago

          Halo implies empty (or low density) at the center. The 'normal' matter is denser at the center of a galaxy. I'm trying to understand why the difference.

          >since dark matter interacts less

          With electromagnetism or gravity?

          • hermitcrab an hour ago

            Did a bit more reading. I was thinking of a halo like an angel's halo, a disk with greater density near the edge and less at the center. But it seems that dark matter halos are roughly spherical with greatest sensity near the centre. In which case halo seems like a pretty poor name.

      • devmor 4 hours ago

        I believe that you have the order of operations misunderstood.

        I probably don't know that much more than you about the subject, but from what I understand, the prevailing model suggests that these Halos formed early in the formation of the universe when spacetime had varying "pockets" of density that naturally led to these halos - the formation of the galactic disk therein was actually supported by the halo existing first, because baryonic matter (aka non-dark matter, the stuff that makes up planets, stars, etc) was still too energetic from the formation of the universe to become gravitationally bound to itself.

        • hermitcrab 3 hours ago

          Does the dark matter not move under the influence of gravity like 'normal' matter?

          • devmor 2 hours ago

            At this point my knowledge probably pales in comparison to skimming some Wikipedia articles, but my understanding is that there is just so much dark matter concentrated in these halos and inter-galactic structures of it that the gravitational effects of baryonic matter are negligible in comparison.

            I believe dark matter comprises something like 80-85% of all matter in the universe.

  • momoschili 8 hours ago

    Dark in the context of astrophysics means specifically that the object/matter does not interact directly with electromagnetic radiation (eg absorb an optical/microwave/radio photon). So it is probably dark matter, but probably unlikely to be a black hole because we can typically detect a black hole's effects in an indirect manner :P

  • layer8 7 hours ago

    From the paper, it could be the dark-matter halo of an otherwise too faint dwarf galaxy. They state that a “more definitive statement on what type of object [it] is will require deep optical/infrared observations to detect any potential EM emission”.

  • t8sr 7 hours ago

    Definitionally, yes. It’s inert but lenses light around it.

    The paper is more about the technical achievement of detecting it, IIUC. It’s not the first dark matter inference we’ve had, and doesn’t really tell us anything new about the stuff.

    • daxfohl 6 hours ago

      It challenges warm dark matter and ultralight dark matter theories because they'd be less likely to clump into something so small. Similarly MOND would have trouble explaining a completely isolated chunk of it at this size (any baryonic matter trapped in a region this small would almost certainly emit enough light to detect).

      • t8sr an hour ago

        I’m admittedly a few years out of date in this, but weren’t those already kinda ruled out? I’ve never met anyone who took MOND seriously - it looks like it’s a pet project of a small number of people who cite each other, and people in different subfields have always been saying it doesn’t work for them (diffuse galaxies, etc.).

        I know the current models favor cold DM, I thought the hot DM model was abandoned already when it became clear that clusters of any size exist?

  • bbor 8 hours ago

    I'm an amateur but I feel confident enough to answer -- hopefully not a mistake!

    They're explicitly looking for "Dark Matter", which doesn't "interact" with normal ("baryonic") matter or electromagnetic radiation (e.g. light). So it's not a black hole for sure, as those are composed of regular ol' matter.

    RE:"dark star", that's really up in the air, I'd say! AFAICT the only academic reference to that term is for normal stars influenced by dark matter[1], but kinda the whole problem here is that we don't know much about what dark matter is composed of or into. Certainly it's not going to be a star in the traditional sense as it can't emit light, but I'm not aware of any reason this object can't end up being a giant sphere.

    FWIW, Wikipedia says "One of the most massive stars known is Eta Carinae, with 100–200 [solar masses]", whereas this object "has a mass that is a million times greater than that of our Sun". If we're going to use metaphors, I think "dark dwarf galaxy" might be more appropriate?

    [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1004.1258

    • t8sr 7 hours ago

      (I’m an astrophysics undergrad.) Black holes aren’t composed of anything, they’re just defined by their charge, spin and mass equivalent.

      Dust clouds have those mass ranges. It’s not a galaxy-scale mass by any measure.

      This thread has a lot of CS people being confident about physics.

      • evanb 7 hours ago

        I was always surprised that when we talk about BHs mass, charge, and spin that we really mean U(1) (electromagnetic) gauge charge and not charges from global symmetries. (If BHs had global charge, you could at least say that this or that black hole was made out of N baryons, or whatever.)

        But it's really so---according to GR, black holes don't have global charges. So even if you see a star made out of baryons collapse into a black hole, once the BH settles down into a steady state you can't say it's "really" got baryons inside: the baryon number gets destroyed.

        (Of course, a different model of gravity that preserves unitarity might upset this understanding.)

        • daxfohl 6 hours ago

          And that a BH made from matter and one made from antimatter are mathematically identical, and merging them would not cause any explosion.

          • actionfromafar an hour ago

            Thanks! That made me (superficially of course) understand it. Super weird stuff.

      • 9991 4 hours ago

        Welcome to Hacker News.

      • bbor 2 hours ago

        I mean, I included a disclaimer... But regardless, you appear to be wrong on both counts (or at least contradicting Wikipedia):

        1. "The presence of a black hole can be inferred through its interaction with OTHER MATTER and with electromagnetic radiation such as visible light." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole

        2. "A dwarf galaxy is a small galaxy composed of ABOUT 1000 up to several billion stars" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_galaxy

        Darn astrophysics majors being confident about astronomy! ;)

    • tremon 7 hours ago

      which doesn't "interact" with normal ("baryonic") matter

      I think you mean it doesn't interact electromagnetically with either matter or radiation. It does interact with normal matter via gravity -- that's pretty much the strongest (only?) argument for its existence.

      I'm not aware of any reason this object can't end up being a giant sphere

      AIUI, most theories posit that solid spheres of dark matter are very unlikely because matter accretion is governed by electromagnetism in addition to gravity, and dark matter is not supposed to obey the former. Most models assume that dark matter is organized in gaseous clouds (halos); strictly speaking that's still a giant sphere, just not in the same way that Jupiter or the Sun or even the Oort Cloud is.

    • bongodongobob 7 hours ago

      100-200 solar masses is not one of the largest known. There are many that are 1000s of times more massive than the sun.

      • baconbrand 6 hours ago

        This confused me too from all those solar object size comparisons I’ve seen. Turns out there are stars that are 1000s of times bigger than the sun, but they aren’t the same density.

      • shagie 7 hours ago

        I'm unaware of any stars in the 1000 Msun range. Wikipedia puts 291 Msun of R136a1 at the largest. After that, 195 M of R136a2 is the next. A star at 100 Msun would be in the most massive stars known.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_massive_stars#Lis...

        • mr_toad 2 hours ago

          “ A number of the "stars" listed below may actually be two or more companions orbiting too closely for our telescopes to distinguish, each star possibly being massive in itself but not necessarily "supermassive" to either be on this list, or near the top of it. “

          “ More globally, statistics on stellar populations seem to indicate that the upper mass limit is in the 120-solar-mass range,[1] so any mass estimate above this range is suspect. “

          There are good theoretical reasons why a star shouldn’t normally get as big as the ones on the top of the list. Long story short: they’d very quickly shed mass due to their intense luminosity. Some of them might even be boiling with bubbles of pure radiation.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_luminosity

          Beyond that, there’s also the possibility of pair-instability supernova, which might cause the most massive stars to literally disintegrate.

  • bbarnett 8 hours ago

    Or a cloaked ship?

    • sixo 8 hours ago

      If so it's a big one, 1M solar masses.

      • layer8 7 hours ago

        That’s just how warp drives happen to appear from the outside.

    • preisschild 7 hours ago

      ... and its heading right for us :P

  • alansaber 8 hours ago

    They found a statistical anomaly that they're trying to atrribute to new physics, using some novel maths. So a tiny speck of evidence towards a new theory of matter (i know nothing about astro, just my supposition)

jagged-chisel 9 hours ago

Is this the first time this article author has seen “image” used like this? We image human anatomy the same way - sophisticated algorithms take the output of CT, ultrasound, MRI and build something we can interpret visually.

  • momoschili 7 hours ago

    why would you get that impression?

    • nonethewiser 7 hours ago

      my read on it.

      - the quotes around image in the title

      - the commenter believes image is the correct word in a more literal sense

staplers 9 hours ago

  the lowest mass dark object currently measured

  one million times the mass of the Sun
Sometimes you read things that remind you how vast and untamable our universe really is.
  • GuB-42 7 hours ago

    I think there is a shortcut being taken here.

    We are surrounded by dark objects, a rock is a dark object, exoplanets are dark objects, and so are black holes. Pretty much everything but stars are dark objects. They are all dark because they don't emit light.

    Here, I think they mean stuff (whatever it is) that can only be detected by gravitational lensing, and it makes sense that it has to be extremely heavy, because gravity is so weak.

    • RogerL 7 hours ago

      I'm not a physicist but every definition of dark matter that I read says it does not interact with electromagnetic radiation hence it is invisible, and rocks are not that dark matter (wiki. NASA, etc)

      • seanw444 7 hours ago

        So how do we know that these "dark matter objects" aren't actually just massive collections of normal matter that is dim enough and at such a far distance that it would appear (angular resolution-wise) to be invisible, but we can still detect the lensing?

        • mr_toad 2 hours ago

          > just massive collections of normal matter

          Normal matter in the universe is mostly hydrogen, which should coalesce to form stars, which give off light. The lack of light compared to the estimated mass is precisely the paradox.

        • ianburrell 6 hours ago

          There are a few reasons. It would be visible when backlit. Gravitational lensing detection limits the size so it can't planets (MACHOs). The CMB shows that only sixth of matter interacts with other matter, the rest is only interacts gravitationally.

      • lutusp 7 hours ago

        > ... every definition of dark matter that I read says it does not interact with electromagnetic radiation ...

        Actually, dark matter does interact with electromagnetic radiation -- it can deflect it, as in the case of gravitational lensing. But dark matter doesn't either emit nor absorb electromagnetic radiation directly.

        We only know about dark matter because of its gravitational effects.

        • GuB-42 6 hours ago

          How about stellar mass black holes?

          They are much lighter than 1 million solar masses and we know a few of them, with a variety of ways to detect them, including companion stars orbiting around them and gravitational waves during mergers.

          Black holes fit the definition of dark matter, as they neither emit nor absorb electromagnetic radiation, not in a way that could be detected anyways. This is the "MACHO" theory of dark matter, which is not the favorite, but it is still taken seriously. Stellar mass black holes have been ruled out, I think, but it doesn't mean dark matter can't be made of black holes. In fact, primordial black holes are a rather hot theory.

    • lawlessone 6 hours ago

      yeah all those other things absorb light so they can be detected by the light they block and the infrared light the re-emit.

      Dark matter seems more ghostly , like gravitational shadow of matter

  • catigula 8 hours ago

    If you think that's crazy, it's likely a drop in the bucket comared to the noumenonal world.

    There's no reason to think that our senses encompass the vast majority of understanding everything in reality and current evidence that they, in fact, do not, via dark matter as a primary source.

    I suspect our senses encompass a meaningless fraction of the noumenon.

    • procflora 7 hours ago

      In what way is dark matter not a phenomenon? Just because we don't know what it is doesn't make it a noumenon.

      • catigula 7 hours ago

        It's that it demonstrates that some sort of noumenon can likely have partial but not 'full' overlap as we understand it with a phenomenon.

        To elaborate, the noumenon can have properties that are unknown to us and outside the purview of certain senses (if not all) but still have partial phenomenal effects such as gravitational effects.

        Given partial overlap, we could, and likely should, surmise that overlap, if partial, can also be zero. In fact, partial overlap with certain things (such as the gravitational field) but no sensory experience is exactly what we'd predict if this were true.

        The mistake is thinking I'm asserting that things are phenomenon or noumenon when that's not quite right. Mostly, the supposition is that things can exist and have either 'full' (unlikely I think), partial, or zero overlap with our sensory experience. Things that demonstrably have partial overlap suggest a wider world of things. I simply find the idea that our evolved sensory experience encompass even a sizable fraction of reality to lack epistemic humility.

        This is obviously speculative.

        • throwway120385 5 hours ago

          A good example of this would be the scope of our sense of sight as it relates to the entire electromagnetic spectrum. We can't see things like UV or Gamma radiation, we can only infer their existence by their effect on things we can see. The reality is that those phenomena might not actually exist in any perceivable way. The only thing we know, strictly speaking, is that the effect happens, and we have a plausible mental model for why the effect happens that predicted other effects that we also observe. But we can't prove that the mental model is reality.

          This is at the heart of the Allegory of The Cave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave. What we're discussing is a kind of "Natural Philosophy" or Physics, the study of that which is.

womitt 2 hours ago

The big intergalactic 220V plug

cellular 4 hours ago

What are the white blocky pixels in the picture?

Why are they there?

geniium 6 hours ago

Probably a small bug in the matrix

deadbabe 6 hours ago

It’s nothing, mostly empty space.

orliesaurus 9 hours ago

a far away civilization probably draining energy from the emptiness of space to power some AI datacenters /s

  • delichon 8 hours ago

    That would be about 2.5 on the Kardashev scale, and in terms of heat, between Kim and Khloé on the Kardashian scale.

    • _joel 8 hours ago

      Is that from the sci-fi novel "Dyson Fear" :)

      • Zigurd 8 hours ago

        That vacuum is scary. Scary overpriced.

  • daxfohl 8 hours ago

    AI to the edge meant they had to port CUDA to a JS framework.

  • alansaber 8 hours ago

    I look forwards to the python tutorial for building gpt-2 with string theory

  • jsbisviewtiful 8 hours ago

    Those gen AI images of cats playing poker won't create their own energy, you know T_T

  • excalibur 8 hours ago

    It's our descendants. They had to travel back in time to escape entropy and find sufficient quantities of energy to sustain them, which is why they're 10 billion light years away.

    • DaveZale 8 hours ago

      also, they didn't like what the future looked like

      • baggachipz 8 hours ago

        They're blaming Tylenol?! That's it, we're out of here.

hearsathought 6 hours ago

Not a "distant universe" but our universe distant in time ( aka our universe in the past when it was younger ).

The title reads like astronomers found a mysterious dark object in another universe. Like a distant solar system or a distant galaxy.

Or am I misunderstanding the findings here?