Fumfer Physics 19: Galactic Filaments, Gravitational Waves
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Vocal.Media
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/11
In Fumfer Physics, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner explore the physics of gravitational wells, rotational asymmetry, and the nature of galactic filaments. They discuss how irregularly rotating massive objects emit gravitational waves—steady hums or periodic pulses—and how galaxies align along cosmic filaments forming the universe’s vast web. Rosner draws a bold analogy between these cosmic structures and the human brain’s associative networks: both systems light up, store, and transmit information. Their dialogue connects astrophysics, consciousness, and cosmic evolution, suggesting that the universe itself might operate through mechanisms of activation, dormancy, and renewal across billions of years.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We’re already at Fumfer Physics episode 19, which shows how slow progress adds up. Those slow drips can take you all the way to the United Nations in Geneva and New York City and even land you an interview with a prime minister or two.
What’s the mathematical difference between a large-scale object with massive gravitational pull—something that creates a deep gravitational well that everything falls toward—and an object that rotates with a small asymmetry, giving off nearly continuous gravitational waves?
So, a kind of steady gravitational hum versus a burst-like or transient one.
Rick Rosner: Either something is collapsing bit by bit—like a dying star collapsing under its own gravity—or it’s maintaining residual rotational energy.
That could come from infalling matter or from the conservation of angular momentum: as the object gets smaller, it spins faster.
Parts of it could be reaching different thresholds of gravitational pressure at different times. When there’s enough pressure, electrons and protons combine into neutrons, creating degenerate neutron matter. That might not happen uniformly; maybe it happens in bursts, though that doesn’t sound perfectly periodic.
Maybe when it collapses, it releases a burst of energy that causes it to expand before collapsing again—a kind of stellar pulsation cycle.
In practice, core-collapse shows brief, non-periodic oscillations and shock stalls over milliseconds to seconds rather than long, repeating collapse–re-expand cycles; treat the “pulsation” idea as a working hypothesis.
When gravitational collapse releases energy, that energy—often in the form of heat, neutrinos, or radiation—could temporarily expand part of the star before gravity takes over again. It could sputter like that, cycling through bursts of collapse and release. That’s a working hypothesis; I haven’t read the latest on it.
Jacobsen: Is it like a spinning top near the end of its cycle?
Rosner: No, not really. But I could look it up and have an actual answer next time.
Jacobsen: There seems to be something strange about galactic filaments. You get these long, thread-like structures—almost strings of galaxies. Observations report statistical trends where the spin axes of quasars or galaxies sometimes show large-scale alignment tendencies.
Rosner: What do you mean by their axes? The spin axes of quasars or galaxies—or, more precisely, the rotational axes of the supermassive black holes at their centers. The gas and dust orbiting those black holes—forming accretion disks—tend to align along similar planes. Locally, such alignments can occur with the surrounding tidal field; across very large scales there are hints but not universal rules. So you’re saying the orbital planes of those disks appear correlated across large regions of space?
Jacobsen: Those orbital planes seem statistically correlated within our local region of the cosmic web. A filament is essentially a chain of galaxies—not a loose, constellated cluster, but a connected thread. If an object gets pulled into part of that chain, it tends to remain within it. Statistically, something moving along that general direction would likely continue to follow the filament rather than drift away because of the continuous gravitational potential along the chain—the “chain wells.” Some would still get caught or spun off, but most would stay.
Rosner: My naive hypothesis is that these galactic filaments are part of what you could call the associative network of the universe. In a metaphorical sense, they function like neural connections—routes through which the cosmos organizes or channels matter and energy.
The reactivation of quenched or dormant galaxies could, in principle, occur along these filaments—gas and matter flowing through them can “light up” previously inactive regions, though rejuvenation appears relatively uncommon and depends on conditions—briefly triggering new star formation. They would brighten again and rejoin the active network of the universe. It might even be part of a cosmic mechanism of recycling or renewal. That’s where I see an analogy to how our brains are wired for association.
The brain consists of an immense web of roughly 10¹¹ neurons, each with thousands of dendrites and axons connecting to others. It’s all wiring, essentially. Electrical impulses travel along those connections, assisted by neurotransmitters—dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, and others—that facilitate communication between neurons.
When certain groups of neurons fire together, they trigger related groups, lighting up patterns across the brain. Those patterns form the basis of thought and awareness. The brain operates combinatorially—each thought or memory arises from a unique, though not perfectly precise, pattern of activation.
When those associative patterns light up, you might suddenly think of an apple, or your second-grade teacher, or abstract ideas like fairness or justice. The underlying neural patterns encode meaning through association, not exact repetition.
The ingredients of thought and awareness rely on things lighting up—neurons firing in patterns. Similarly, I believe the universe has ways to make things light up and ways for them to stop glowing. When something “lights up” cosmically, it can stay active for billions of years.
A galaxy, for instance, might remain luminous for—what?—many billion years on average. That’s a rough estimate. Main-sequence stars, the most common type, can last from a few billion years up to trillions for the smallest red dwarfs, but of course, not all stars in a galaxy ignite simultaneously. Star formation is staggered across immense timescales—perhaps tens of billions of years for the full sequence of stellar birth and death within a galaxy.
So, a galaxy could remain luminous over roughly that range, with wide diversity across masses and environments—“~10 billion years” is an order-of-magnitude picture rather than a rule—with its total star-formation activity declining as its gas supply depletes. There’s likely a typical luminous lifespan of about ten billion years for active star-forming galaxies before they fade into quiescence.
So, roughly from the time a galaxy first lights up until it fades back to a fraction of that brightness—say, five percent of its peak—you’d count that as its active lifetime.
When a galaxy stops forming stars, it loses some of its radiance—it doesn’t collapse, but its stellar populations age and redden. Many of its internal orbital orientations, the angular momentum of its matter, are preserved. It doesn’t simply collapse into a collection of black holes. Instead, its stellar remnants and dark matter halos continue orbiting, maintaining structure even though the galaxy is no longer actively forming stars.
Those galaxies still contain information—mass distributions, momentum, chemical traces—but that information isn’t being exchanged dynamically with the rest of the universe anymore. However, if you were to feed such a galaxy new cold gas—rather than energy like photons or neutrinos—it could, in principle, “reawaken.”
If that galaxy sits in a region of the universe that’s more gravitationally dense—closer to a node of the cosmic web—it wouldn’t take much inflow to re-ignite limited star formation. By channeling new gas into a gravitationally bound region, you can briefly rejuvenate it.
Not an enormous amount of matter—well, relatively speaking, it’s still considerable, because you’re fueling a galaxy—but the key is that the galaxy is already structured to react. When you inject new gas, it can cool, collapse, and form stars again, depending on local conditions and feedback.
If you think in terms of association—creating a physical system that can store information in a dormant state and then be reactivated easily—then you’d want a mechanism that allows for that kind of “easy on, easy off” functionality.
One aspect of black hole and galactic physics might involve the same dynamic: energy storage and reactivation. You can, in principle, turn on old galaxies again—feed them new matter that will collapse into stars. The remnants in those galaxies could have their outer layers stripped off in massive, energetic bursts, and that ejected material could then re-coalesce into new stars.
Though on second thought, that might not hold up broadly. A “re-lit” star would likely show distinct, anomalous physical properties—odd elemental ratios, radiation patterns, or instabilities—that astronomers would have noticed by now. So I doubt that happens on a large scale.
But this might apply to the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies—the ones with millions or billions of solar masses. Those giants can release enormous amounts of energy, shedding parts of their outer accretion disks and flooding their host galaxies with radiation and energetic particles—protons and electrons—that could, in some cases, compress nearby gas clouds and seed new star formation. Positive AGN feedback of this sort is observed in specific systems, though quenching is more common—so consider it a sometimes-mechanism, not a universal one.
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