Sometimes simple words can be the hardest to define accurately.
For example, in physics, what do we mean by the word structure? The easiest way to conceptualize it is that it's a material object for which whatever force is holding it together outcompetes any other forces that might be involved. For example, a brick could be considered a structure, because the chemical bonds in the fired clay are stronger than the forces trying to pull it apart. The sand on a beach, however, doesn't form a single structure, because the forces between the sand grains aren't strong enough to hold them together against the power of the wind and water.
Simple enough, it'd seem, but once you get out into space, it gets a little more difficult.
In astronomy, a structure is something that is bound together by gravity so that on some scale, it acts as a single unit. The Solar System is a cosmic structure; within it, the gravitational pull of the Sun overwhelms all other forces. The Milky Way is a cosmic structure by the same definition. But how big can you get and still call it a single structure? The question gives astronomers fits, because (to abide by the definition) you have to show that the pieces of the structure are bound together in such a way that the mutual gravitational attraction is higher than the other forces they experience -- and given that a lot of these things are very far away, any such determination is bound to rest on some fairly thin ice.
The largest generally accepted cosmic structure is the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, a galactic filament that (from our perspective) is in the night sky in the Northern Hemisphere in spring and early summer. It's ten billion light years in length -- making it a little over a tenth as long as the entire observable universe!
In the above image, each one of the tiny dots of light is an entire galaxy containing billions of stars; the brighter blobs are galaxy clusters, each made up of millions of galaxies.
And the whole thing is bound together by gravity.
What's kind of overwhelming about this is that because there are these enormous cosmic structures, there are also gaps between them, called supervoids. One of the largest is the Boötes Void. This thing is 330 million light years across, and contains almost no matter at all; any given cubic meter of space inside the void might have a couple of hydrogen atoms, and that's about it. To put it in perspective; if the Earth was sitting in the center of the Boötes Void, there wouldn't be a single star visible. It wouldn't have been until the 1960s that we'd have had telescopes powerful enough to detect the nearest stars.
That, my friend, is a whole lot of nothing.
What's coolest about all this is where these structures (and the spaces between them) came from. On the order of 10^-32 seconds (that's 0.00000000000000000000000000000001 seconds) after the Big Bang, the bizarre phenomenon of cosmic inflation had not only blown the universe up by an amount that beggars belief (estimates are that in that first fraction of a second, it expanded from the size of a proton to about the size of a galaxy), it also smoothed out any lumpy bits (what the cosmologists call anisotropies). This is why the universe today is pretty smooth and homogeneous -- if you look out into space, you see on average the same number of galaxies no matter which way you look.
But there are some pretty damn big anisotropies, like the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall and the Boötes Void. So where did those come from?
The current model is that as inflation ended, an interaction between regular matter and dark matter triggered a shock wave through the plasma blob that at that point was the entire universe. This shock wave -- a ripple, a pressure wave much like a sound wave propagating through the air -- pushed some bits of the regular matter closer together and pulled some bits apart, turning what had been a homogeneous plasma into a web of filaments, sheets... and voids.
These baryon acoustic oscillations, that occurred so soon after the Big Bang it's hard to even wrap my brain around a number that small, are why we now have cosmic structures millions, or billions, of light years across.
So that's our mindblowing science for today. Gravitationally-linked structures that span one-tenth of the size of the observable universe, and spaces in between containing damn near nothing at all, all because of a ripple that passed through the universe when it was way under one second old.
If that doesn't make you realize that all of our trials and tribulations here on Earth are insignificant, nothing will.
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Here are the answers to the puzzles from yesterday's post. If you haven't finished thinking about them on your own, scroll no further!
1. The census taker puzzle
The first clue is that the product of the daughters' ages is equal to 36. There are eight possible trios of numbers that multiply to 36: (1, 1, 36), (1, 2, 18), (1, 3, 12), (1, 4, 9), (1, 6, 6), (2, 2, 9), (2, 3, 6), and (3, 3, 4). Clue #2 is that the ages sum to equal the house number across the street, so the next step is to figure out what the house number could be. Respectively: 38, 21, 16, 14, 13, 13, 11, and 10.
The key here is that when the census taker looks at the house number across the street, he still can't figure it out. So it can't be (1, 4, 9), for example -- because if it was, as soon as he saw that the house number was 14, he'd know that was the only possible answer. The fact that even after seeing the house number, he still doesn't know the answer, means it has to be one of the two trios of numbers that sums to the same thing -- 13. So it either has to be (1, 6, 6) or (2, 2, 9).
Then, clue #3 is that the man's oldest daughter has red hair. In the first possibility, there is no oldest daughter -- the oldest children are twins. So his daughters have to be a nine-year-old and a pair of two-year-old twins.
2. The St. Ives riddle
The answer is one. "As I was going to St. Ives..." -- it doesn't say a thing about where the other people he met were going, if anywhere.
3. The bear
It's a white bear. The only place on Earth you could walk a mile south, a mile east, and a mile north and end up back where you started is if your starting place was the North Pole.
4. A curious sequence
The pattern is that it's the names of the single digit numbers in English, in alphabetical order. So the next one in the sequence is 3.
5. Classifying the letters
The letters are classified by their symmetry. (The capital letters only, of course.) Group 1 is symmetrical around a vertical line, Group 2 around a horizontal line, Group 3 is around either a horizontal or a vertical line, Group 4 has no line symmetry but is symmetrical through a 180-degree rotation around their central point, and Group 5 are asymmetrical.
6. The light bulb puzzle
Turn on switch one, and leave it on. Turn on switch two for ten minutes, then turn it off. Leave switch three off. Go up to the tenth floor. The bulb operated by switch one will be on; the one operated by switch two will be dark, but hot; and the one operated by switch three will be dark and cold.
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