Katie Mack Profile picture
Apr 19 6 tweets 2 min read
Today in my general relativity class I got to talk about my favorite SUPER WEIRD COSMOLOGY FACT which is that if you have galaxies of the same size at different distances, beyond a certain distance, the farther away the galaxy is the BIGGER it appears in the sky (!!!)
If you want to dig into the math, you can look up "angular diameter distance", which is essentially a measure of how far away something appears to be based on how big it looks, and you'll find that ang. diam. distance only increases to a certain point, and then it goes down again
The intuitive reason that the most distant things look weirdly large is that the light we're seeing from them is from so long ago that the universe was MUCH smaller back then, so they were actually MUCH CLOSER and therefore covered more of the sky than you'd expect.
It's incredibly useful for astronomers that this effect occurs, because it means that we can see details in distant galaxies that would just be single pixels if the universe worked in a more sensible way. Cosmic expansion FTW!
Here's the very sciencey diagram I included in my book (#EndOfEverythingBook) to illustrate the concept of how a galaxy of the same size would start to look bigger again at a large distance. There's more discussion of it, and several other deeply trippy things, in Chapter 4. A diagram of Angular Size on the y-axis and Distance on the
When I was learning astronomy in college/grad school I had a couple classes where angular diameter distance came up and the prof was like "oh & there's this unusual thing where it turns over" and I was all 🤯 and they just carried on like nothing happened and no one was screaming

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More from @AstroKatie

Apr 10
Commercial airplanes are reasonably safe, ventilation-wise, *when in flight*, due to high-quality filtration.

But during boarding, taxi, & after landing, the air isn’t flowing, & for up to an hour you’re sitting in a stagnant tube, breathing concentrated exhaled air. Masks help.
How bad is the ventilation when the plane is on the ground? I carry a CO2 meter on flights to check air exchange, and I had to turn off the unhealthily-high-CO2 alarm entirely because I kept setting higher thresholds when it went off and eventually I gave up.
(The CO2 levels aren’t actually dangerous for you for the time you’re in the plane, but when they’re high they indicate not much outside air is coming in, and when not much air is flowing, it’s not being filtered so much either.)
Read 4 tweets
Mar 14
Pretty sure I have never in my professional life used more than the six digits of pi that I have memorized: 3.14159.
In cosmology, we’re usually calculating stuff to within an order of magnitude; if we can get percent-level precision we’re THRILLED, but most of the time that precision is hiding a systematic error somewhere anyway.
Read 4 tweets
Mar 7
Unfortunate developments in space diplomacy 😞
Meanwhile, some heated Twitter exchanges between retired US astronaut @StationCDRKelly and the current administrator of the Russian space agency Roscosmos
Currently, the International Space Station crew consists of two Russians, four Americans, and one German. nasa.gov/mission_pages/…
Read 4 tweets
Mar 6
Every time I talk about #DarkMatter or #DarkEnergy several people jump in to say “ehhh sounds like a fudge factor/epicycles/aether!” And I get why — we’re talking about stuff we can’t directly see, it’s weird! — but, very sincerely, we did consider that. xkcd.com/1758/
There is a very small, very vocal group of astrophysicists who constantly work on alternative models in an attempt to do away with dark matter and/or dark energy. They write a lot of papers & get a LOT of press. But, they have yet to produce a model that compels the rest of us.
It’s not that we wouldn’t LOVE to have some explanation of these phenomena that does not include a component of the universe that refuses to interact with our detectors. We like catching stuff in detectors! We like being able to see stuff! But sometimes the cosmos doesn’t care.
Read 6 tweets
Mar 2
Having now handwritten half a semester’s worth of general relativity lecture notes, I have determined the following ranking of the most common Greek subscript/superscript indices in order of ease of tiny-writing and overall aesthetic value A row of small handwritten lowercase Greek letters: alpha, s
IMPORTANT CORRECTION: previous version somehow tragically left out high-cuteness-value lambda. See below for definitive list. A set of small handwritten Greek lowercase letters: alpha, s
Okay this is preliminary but I believe it is correct to first order. A graph of "cuteness" vs "ease of tiny-writin
Read 4 tweets
Feb 17
I understand why the confusion exists but "case rates are going down" is not the same as "case rates are low" and the former should never determine policy when the latter condition is not met.
If you leap out of an airplane with no parachute, your speed will, in fact, go down at some point as you're approaching terminal velocity! That does not mean everything is going to be okay.
Argh I should have said acceleration rather than speed; your speed will get to terminal velocity, and terminal velocity will be a little slower when you're closer to the ground, but that's a smaller effect than the acceleration change (& happens at/after terminal vel is reached).
Read 4 tweets

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