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

  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.
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"?
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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.”

Probably a small bug in the matrix
It’s nothing, mostly empty space.
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.

> ridiculously tiny and fragile my little life

Naw!!! We are rare, so rare that we might be unique in our solar system, galaxy! We don't look little and instead the reason for the whole show! "Where is everybody?" -- easy, we're it. Soooo, what's the reason??

The whole event is likely to be an exponential, and the last, ah, after Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, Schrödinger, biochemistry, ..., computers, we look like we're at -- a standard for exponential growth, e.g., the question P v NP -- the unique big turn up out of the atmosphere ... blowing past Andromeda at 0.5 c and accelerating.

Completely orthogonal to the feeling of small/unimportant, my mind gets rolled up in thinking about how much activity is going on that's not being experienced by anyone. Think of the raging storms on venus' surface or the ice volcanoes on Io, or the methane raining down on Titan..all that stuff is happening right now, as we speak. But nobody is there to feel it or hear it or see it. And that's our own solar system. Imagine how many things are happening galaxy wide or beyond. So much stuff is happening right now!! This boggles my mind because it doesn't rely on any speculation about alien life. It's almost certainly a fact, unless we're in a simulation and the rest of the universe is in the "clipping plane" of the scene.
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?

What are the white blocky pixels in the picture?

Why are they there?

The big intergalactic 220V plug
When the smallest dark object we can find is still a million times heavier than our sun, maybe it's time to stop worrying about that Monday meeting.
Pretty wild that we can now detect million-solar-mass objects that are completely invisible, just by noticing tiny pinches in gravitational arcs from galaxies billions of light-years away. It's like doing cosmic archaeology with a microscope made of math and radio waves
>> a key question for astronomers is whether dark matter is smooth or clumpy

And if it has a chewy nougat center.

(Sorry. Reminded me of an old TV commercial.)

My theory is it's maybe was a supermassive black hole and it was too big for it to keep its energy and then it exploded into something like looks like a dark matter or it's rather can be two black holes collision together and then when the time fast those mini dark matter it's still sucked in and created what I call naderod black hole