Each weekend, I disappear into a question that has no business mattering. How loud can a sound be? How old is the d20 I rolled on Tuesday? How far is the largest black hole we've ever seen?
The answers turn out stranger than they should be. Cosmic Hypothetical is where I keep them — one issue at a time.
The d20 you rolled on Tuesday has a 5,126-year ancestry. Polyhedral dice from Ptolemaic Egypt. Cuneiform race games. A Prussian artillery officer in 1812. Watch the lineage assemble.
No sound on Earth can be louder than 194.09 dB — the moment a wave stops being a wave and becomes a shockwave. Why air has a ceiling, and what happens at it.
The largest known black hole is 10.4 billion light-years away and 66 billion times the mass of the Sun. If you put it where the Sun is, its event horizon would swallow the orbit of Pluto twelve times over.