This is a photo of the gravitational lensing caused by a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy.
The cosmic behemoth is close to the theoretical upper limit of what is possible in the universe and is 10,000 times heavier than the black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy.
It exists in one of the most massive galaxies ever observed – the Cosmic Horseshoe – which is so big it distorts spacetime and warps the passing light of a background galaxy into a giant horseshoe-shaped Einstein ring.
Such is the enormousness of the ultramassive black hole’s size, it equates to 36 billion solar masses, according to a new paper published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Meanwhile, here on the Planet of the Dumbasses, in a country renowned for its dumbassery, a dumbass religious fanatic has convened a conference featuring three dumbass astronaut-apologists to argue that the entire universe is only 6000 years old, and that only the Planet of Dumbasses is populated by dumbasses who are able to look up into the sky and appreciate astronomy. You can read a long and thorough review of this dumbass conference, but the comment that jumped out a me was this one:
Ham went on to discuss the cosmos, naming various constellations and nebulae and demonstrating his familiarity with astronomy. He explained his belief that God had created the universe to showcase His power to human beings; as Psalm 19 says,
The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.The universe, Ham claimed, has no other purpose than to impress us here on Earth with God’s capacity for creation.
So, apparently, a god assembled this gigantic black hole, 36 billion solar masses in size, unobservable until now, in 2025, just to show off. You’d think he could have done a better job of this one planet full of his dumbass worshippers with all the energy and power he used to construct an impossibly distant sphere of death, that we can’t visit and most of us can’t even see. However, the narcissism of this Christian god is far greater than 36 billion stars, I guess, which is why we’re supposed to worship his bloated ego.
To treat science as merely one belief system among many is to misrepresent what science is and why it matters. Claims that science is merely a tool to promote a certain political perspective (whether accusing climate researchers of fabrication or reducing medical research to “Big Pharma” profiteering) are rhetorically powerful because they reframe empirical findings as mere opinion. But while no human endeavor is untouched by ideology, the strength of science lies precisely in its effort to weed ideology out. NASA’s science missions must be protected, not despite the fact that their findings may challenge deeply held beliefs or even particular political goals, but precisely because they do. In an era when the authority of evidence is often undermined or dismissed, defending the integrity of empirical discovery is essential – not only for the future of space science, but for the very idea that reality can be investigated and understood without fear of the consequences of challenging dogma, whether religious or political.
The reviewer is too nice to say it, but I’m not nice. Fuck Charlie Duke. Fuck Jeffrey N. Williams. Fuck Barry “Butch” Wilmore. They are people who have betrayed truth for a religious lie.
And fuck AIG as a staff, organization, and a motherfuckin’ crew. And if you wanna be down with AIG, then fuck you too.
Sorry. You reminded me of the Tupac line and I got carried away
And π is exactly 3.0 because Solomon’s Molten Sea was exactly 30 cubits in circumference and 10 cubits in diameter. We know that because it says so in the Bible which is the inerrant word of god. That business about π = 3.14159… is just the hand of the devil. I expect several state legislatures, specifically Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, South Carolina, Georgia, Texas and Florida, to pass bills to make π agree with the Bible. They may try in the US Congress. Perhaps we need a constitutional amendment to that affect.
The comedian Trae Crowder has a bit that the excessive confidence and arrogance of rednecks and MAGA red-hats is because they are dumb. Trae is a himself a hick from Tennessee, tho he’s moved to LA, so he knows first hand how dumb these folks are. I don’t think Trae is dumb. You could be nice and say “ignorant” I suppose, and stupid is another word you could use, but this is some truly dumb shit.
But don’t you dare eat his fruit! He hates that. Like… really REALLY hates that.
“So, apparently, a god assembled this gigantic black hole, 36 billion solar masses in size, unobservable until now, in 2025, just to show off.”
Geez God, you didn’t need to go to all that trouble. I’d have been impressed if you made a Republican with compassion.
What’s the purpose of the parts of the universe that we can’t see?
@5 larpar
that’s where all the gods hang out and party in private.
robro @2: not so fast; the Bible is silent about the length of the minor axis. It could be nine cubits and a couple of digits across the other way. (I did the math so it must be right.)
billseymour @7:
The problem with that is that there’s no finite formula to calculate the circumference of an ellipse given both axes; any exact formula is either an integral or an infinite series. So any specification of the minor axis is going to be an approximation as well.
(The only reason a circle has a finite formula is that the infinite series is encapsulated within the value of π, and both axes being the same means a lot of the other terms in the series effectively cancel each other out. In an ellipse π effectively has to be replaced by a function of the eccentricity. So, yeah, there’s going to be a value of the minor axis where the circumference is 3d, as the circumference can be anywhere from πd for a circle to 2d for a minor axis of 0, but good luck figuring out the exact ratio required.)
I was joking, actually.
Tangential but in other Spaaaaaace neeeeewwss Trump wants to put nukes on the Moon as well – despite that being illegal and obviously a very bad idea :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-07/nasa-to-fast-track-efforts-to-put-nuclear-reactor-on-the-moon/105616682
Colbert had a good show intro on this here (1 min long) and the old Space1999 rather silly premise springs to mind here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space:_1999
Albeit that was nuclear waste not a nuclear reactor..
Robro, you’re late to the party. Indiana already tried legislating the value of π… and a bunch more states than those you’ve listed have tried legislating the value of women as 0. (Trans are so obviously an irrational number that the legislatures just can’t manage.)
I would think that the greatness of creation would be a humbling experience. But some people only pay lip service to humility.
“(Trans are so obviously an irrational number that the legislatures just can’t manage.)”
Not surprisingly: π isn’t merely irrational, it’s transcendental !
Dumb Idiot Ham, a former science teacher, maybe knowledgeable in a lot of scientific subjects, including astronomy, but that doesn’t make him less stupid or reliable in everything science, history, and religious wise.
Actually the arrogance of Ham is that religion exists to give him money! He paid himself $250,000 in 2022 (IRS form 990). His kids and in-laws are on the payroll too, for $350,000. Since AIG took in $69M in 2022, he can afford to be generous. No wonder Ham never questions God, or His goodness, Ham has 250,000 reasons not to! Ham prays, or preys, all the way to the bank.
how did they measure solomon’s sea? did they have a standard cubit stick? was that stick calibrated? how old was the calibration? i assume they ran a measurement system analysis to determine the amount of variation that exists within their measurement process.
if they properly calculated the uncertainty in the measurement of the diameter and circumference of solomon’s sea, their measured value of pi would agree with the more accurate current value.
robro @ # 2: … π is exactly 3.0 …
Yet according to the Sacred Doctrine of the Trinity, 3 = 1.
Therefore the circumference of a circle equals the diameter of that same circle.
Where is Bernhard Riemann when ya really need him?
NASA has always been a haven for creationists. They jump through hoops to work there so they can claim to be “scientists” and pro-“science” because they have zero evidence to support the very primitive flat Earth views of their allegedly inerrant book of fables. And NASA bends over backwards to allow creationists to work for them, aiding the infestation. Sometimes a creationist does get fired, but it isn’t because they are a creationist. It’s usually because they are incompetent or simply not needed any more since their job was eliminated. In about 2011 NASA laid off 246 people because of budget cuts, and one was an idiot creationist computer technician who used to frequently harass his coworkers by peddling creationist pamphlets and pseudoscience. And he even received warnings about harassing coworkers with his religious pablum. He was not laid off for those reasons, even though he deserved to be, but as a part of the budget cuts his job was no longer required. Of course, he started screaming “Christian persecution” and all the Reich Wingers echoed his false claims. The name of this moron was David Coppedge, and he was your stereotypical religious fanatic.
https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/qs442/nasa_fires_creationist/
NASA is way too accommodating to these arrogantly ignorant fanatics, to avoid the appearance of bias, so they continually apply for jobs there.
And the above is not the first time that any creationist astronaut-apologist have popped up to peddle their irrational views as “scientific”. Astronaut James Irwin claimed to have become a “born-again”* Christian creationist after landing on the moon. From that point on he acted insane, even mounting expeditions to look for Noah’s big box (an ark is a box or chest), while proclaiming that the Genesis creation narrative was real, literal history (monumental levels of brain death are required to believe that). He suffered a serious injury on his on-foot expedition, losing several teeth, and he had to be transported by horseback. After his serious fall, he switched to using a helicopter for his ludicrous search for something as real as fire breathing dragons. Someone a bit more rational would have stated with using a helicopter since it can cover much more ground (but not too rational, or else the expedition would never have happened). How many people actually search for the alleged pots of gold at the ends of rainbows? There may even be some who do that in the US due to the certifiable lunacy known as MAGA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Irwin <== This article is way too kind to Irwin.
*”Born-again” actually means “born yesterday”, due to their sudden astonishing level of credulity. They learn to interpret everything in reality in terms of their belief system instead of altering their belief system to match reality like rational people. As an astronomer said many years ago: “If you start to show some people how to destroy their own power of reason, some will very eagerly finish the job on their own.”
Another NASA related form of crack pottery came from creationist Herold Hill. Hill claimed to be a NASA space “consultant”, but NASA only rented diesel engines from him and he was never a consultant. Hill had spread the stunningly brain-dead story that the NASA computers had discovered a missing day in time, confirming the Joshua fable about the sun and moon standing still for about a day. Being flat Earthers, the original creators of this fable did not know that the Earth rotates, so they have Joshua commanding those two celestial objects to stop moving (of course, the moon also orbits the Earth, while the sun does not). Other Bible verses clearly state that when the sun goes down in the West, it races under the (obviously flat) earth to come up in the East. Even Jesus in the New Testament confirms a Flat Earth.
Hill claimed that the NASA computers were “roaming” over time, and they stopped with a red light displayed when they “discovered” the missing day. Hill is a profoundly scientific illiterate moron, and he has absolutely no idea how computers even work, they can’t “roam over time” and discover a missing day. And of course, that “missing day” was found to have occurred over three millennia ago, confirming the Joshua fable.
And he even used the fable about Hezekiah thinking he was going to die from a mere boil, while Isaiah (a loon who walked for 3 years naked in the desert and saw visions of fire breathing dragons, so of course he is a prophet) gets the sun to move back 10 degrees to convince Hezekiah that a fig leaf poultice will cure his “fatal” boil, so that he will continue to live. Of course, religionists all over the US picked up on this “science confirms the Bible” nonsense that the ultra-credulus are always eager to believe.
The “science confirms the Joshua Bible fable” appears to have actually started with a book by Yale Prof. C. A. Totten in 1890! Totten was an idiot Adventist who embraced Bible literalism and wanted to “prove” the Bible was “true”, using the same Joshua and Hezekiah fables. He had also made a stunningly stupid prediction that failed (the reign of the Antichrist would occur in the seven-year period from 1892 to 1899). But, failed prophecies do not affect true believers since the Bible is totally “inerrant”, no matter how absurd. Just tell them something they want to believe, and they will believe it to unassailable levels.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-lost-day/
And yet another flaky NASA astronaut was Edgar Mitchel, co-founder of “The Institute of Noetic Sciences”, which has nothing to do with science. It combines Eastern Indian religion with new age nonsense, including ESP and “alternative medicine”. Noetic means “what is known by intuition”, or, in other swords, believed without evidence. He was also a “ufologist” (alien spacecraft are visiting the Earth). Mitchell even botched his space capsule’s return to Earth by not paying attention when he should have fired the retro rockets, landing many miles away from the designated target zone, and then panicking and opening the capsule door too early and sinking the capsule. In other words, he was a professional dofus. The myth of NASA astronauts being the best and the brightest is difficult to maintain when they have so many morons for astronauts. Surviving test pilots are preferred because they are risk-takers, intelligence is a very distant requirement. The Wikipedia article on Mitchel and Institute of Noetic Sciences is severely lacking in critical examination, and it leaves out multiple embarrassing details.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Noetic_Sciences
@ ^ zetopan :
As far as I’m aware only Gus Grissom’s Liberty Bell-7* capsule sank and that wasn’t his fault. It was Scott Carpenter** who wasn’t paying enough attention because he was focused on doing scientific observations on his Mercury program flight causing him to splash down well off course – although his capsule didn’t sink.
Mitchell’s Apollo 14 splashdown; following his Moon walk (along with impromptu lunar golfer and first American to reach space albeit sub-orbitally Alan Shepard), seems, as far as I can know & can find, to have be routine.
I can however add Charlie Duke** to the list of very religious Apollo astronauts although that happened later post NASA career following his struggles with coming back down to Earth from that moon walking Apollo 16 flight and, sadly, the only scientist Harrison Schmitt who ever walked on the moon – in the final Apollo landing ended up as a fucking Climate science Denier again, long after his career with NASA had finished.
OTOH, none of that is NASA’s fault and there’s a lot of good rational people at NASA too & it did and still does some amazing, inspiring, useful science and represents a wide variety of esp American humans and thus human nature and doesn’t claim to be perfect or infallible.
.* See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-Redstone_4#Splashdown
.** See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Carpenter#Recovery
.*** See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Duke#Later_life
zetopan @ # 19: Noetic means “what is known by intuition”, or, in other swords, believed without evidence.
My New Oxford American Dictionary: relating to mental activity or the intellect
Merriam Webster: … anything related to the intellect or the activity of the mind. It derives from the Greek word “nous,” meaning “mind,” and is often used in philosophical contexts to describe insights or knowledge gained through intellectual processes.
Cambridge Dictionary: … relating to the activity of the mind, such as thoughts, feelings or experiences.
In my quick search, only The Institute for Noetic Sciences defines it as “… inner wisdom, direct knowing, or intuition, and refers to a deeper form of knowing beyond logical reasoning.
Debunking that relies on the debunkees’ own definitions would seem self-defeating at best.
Whatcha got on those “numerous embarrassing details” that you claim Wikipfft omits?
StevoR @ # 20 – You left out Harrison Schmitt’s single term in the US Senate, (misrepresenting New Mexico), where as a loyal but undistinguished Republican he nipped at Jimmy Carter’s ankles before loyally licking Ronald Reagan’s butt.