You wanna hear my evidence-free cosmic structure theory? Of course you do.
If you shine a laser through a mass of soap bubbles it will unsurprisingly split into lots of smaller beams due to a mix of refraction and reflection. I have long held the suspicion that there's an isomorphism between gravitational and surface tension structures, that the multiplicity and distance of galaxies may be somewhat illusory, and that many of them are translated/rotated reflections of nearer ones. Laugh now, perhaps gasp in wonder later.
There was a somewhat similar search for these duplicate galaxies as evidence for a universe with positive curvature. Because in that case if you look deep enough you'll see more images of the same galaxies although they'll be further back in time and possibly shifted in the way you're describing by the cosmic structure. It didn't pan out obviously.
What you're describing sounds like the curvature or topology of space would be non-flat. AFAIK this hasn't been completely ruled out, but so far every piece of evidence suggests the universe is flat over vast distances.
Intuitively I'd say if there was curvature or topological irregularities at the furthest distances we can observe, there wouldn't be a consistent redshift observed on far objects because some of them would be coming towards us instead of pulling away.
What you're describing is gravitational lensing. It can make one galaxy appear to be several in different places or shapes. It is, however, well understood.
I know what gravitational lensing is, but that's not what I have in mind (or rather, my gut - while I have a strong hunch about this, I do not want to invest the years of hard study to validate it or more likely end up in a dead end).
My hunch is that rather than space being a contiguous void with isolated mass of gravity behaving like tiny monopolar magnets, at the intersection between different mass systems there are 'surfaces' of some sort like the walls of a bubble in a pile of foam, and that if you could encounter this 'surface' you would either be repelled by it (most likely) or make contact and be able to slide around on it, and then once you got to the angles where walls joins, you would be able to zip along the intersections at great speed in ways that defy conventional physics. I can't really explain it in greater depth, it's an intuition that's half lifelong fascination with looking at soap films and what foam does, and half 'it came to me in a dream.'
Your comment reminds me of a picture I saw a few days ago of a telescope shot, caption "there are no stars in this picture, only galaxies" and there were so. Many. Bright spots.
I don't know where or when it was taken, or what part of the sky that happens in. Maybe it's just a really long lens, so it's seeing "through" the galaxy we normally see "stars" from?
Anyhow, how do you think you could prove this or how someone could prove it? Is it like, two observers on opposite sides of the planet observing the same thing, say during an eclipse or something? Maybe radioastronomy?
You might be thinking of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image (https://science.nasa.gov/asset/hubble/hubble-ultra-deep-fiel...). I believe it was the result of NASA saying "Let's look at what appears to be a completely dark spot in space, zoom in as far as we can, and see what's there."
We see stars in our galaxy because they are close enough to us that we see them as individual stars. Compare that to the Andromeda Galaxy, which is far enough away that without intense zoom, it looks like a single source of light. There are galaxies even farther away, which we cannot see with the naked eye at all, but zooming in on them like Hubble did means we eventually get enough resolution to see they are individual galaxies, unfathomably far away.
JWST being able to see infrared means we'll see galaxies that are so far away, their light is redshifted so we (and Hubble) cannot even see them at all.
With regards to your question about how to test the bubble hypothesis posted by parent, we would be limited by how variable our point of view can be. We can gather what data we can at one end of Earth's orbit, and then try to see from the opposite end and compare what we see, comparing data sets to see if certain galaxies or stars are in different positions. We already do some of this when dealing with gravitational lensing and I believe it's one of the primary ways we can detect black holes, as they bend light a lot.
no; https://astrodon.social/@catherineryanhyde/11424695314205282...
this is what i was thinking of; thanks for the hubble reference, though!
I really don't know how you'd prove it, or I'd be operating a cranky social media account demanding the scientific community pay attention to me! My knowledge of astronomy/cosmology tops out around Quanta magazine reader level and studying the subject academically always seemed like a luxury for people who already have money. The 'space is foam' idea just hit me out of the blue one day ~20 years ago when I was staring at bubbles and looking at how tiny ones interact with larger ones. I feel like it has something to do with heliopause and plasma, but every time I read up on it the scientific consensus seems to be 'we still don't know much about it,' so I don't know what to do with the idea.
> once you got to the angles where walls joins, you would be able to zip along the intersections at great speed in ways that defy conventional physics.
Hyperspace lanes!
I think if some boundary like this existed it would have physical ramifications that would be quite apparent. space is full of gas and radiation referred to as the interstellar medium (ISM). We can measure the speed, temperature, density, or whatever you want to know about the ISM. If there were regions of space that somehow exerted force on particles or otherwise allowed them to move quickly I suspect we would see it.
I don't laugh but it is an interesting idea. Most of the theoretical physics starts that way and then gradually verifying such assumptions with great care and experimentation over multiple generations of scientists.
> I have long held the suspicion that there's an isomorphism between gravitational and surface tension structures...
Sounds like domain walls.
This concept is a bit too advanced for me (or the page is too minimal to easily understand), but it sounds fascinating. I'll read up more on it, thanks.
Fair critique! I tried to find a more accessible Wikipedia article but they all look like this...
Simply put, it's a topological defect or discontinuity, but that makes it sounds worse than it really is. I find it easiest to visualize with magnets. They want to align with their neighbors, so in general you get big blocks (domains) where all particles are aligned. What happens at the border when blocks with different alignments meet? We call that a domain wall. That's literally all it is!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_defect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_domain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_wall_(magnetism)
You can find domains walls in magnets, metallic crystal grain structures, liquid crystals, pretty much anything that wants to self-align. One issue: gravity doesn't particularly want to self-align. Or does it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_symmetry_breaking
I've only got a surface understanding of this stuff myself. Best of luck in your research!
You would see many more distorted galaxies if this kind of effect would contribute a lot of illusory galaxies