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Any such radiation would have arrived with the light of the black hole flaring. The fact that you're alive to read this implies that nothing fatal happened.
by NikkiA 7y ago
Any such radiation would have arrived with the light of the black hole flaring. The fact that you're alive to read this implies that nothing fatal happened.
- luc4sdreyer 7y agoMaybe some people did die, it's a bit too early to tell if it killed, say ten people. It's probably very unlikely though. More importantly, there is a very wide spectrum of danger between death and no effect, especially when you consider things like cancer. I assumed that was the point of the grandparent's question.
- TearsInTheRain 7y agoSounds like we should all just stay inside to be safe from the blackholes. That suits me just fine
- kabdib 7y agoX-class flares from our sun are 10E32 or so ergs. The black hole flares were roughly 10E35 ergs, about a thousand times more energetic but they are about a billion times farther away than our sun. Apply N^2 law and . . . The amount of radiation you received from the Sagittarius flares is almost indescribably tiny. Many, many orders of magnitude less than the cosmic ray background radiation that we already live with. If you didn't have a sensor pointed right at the BH, you wouldn't be able to distinguish it from the noise.
- dnautics 7y agoyou don't know that different frequencies of radiation aren't associated with different phases of a multistage event that play out over the course of a day or a month or a century.
- adamisom 7y agoBut you're missing the point, which is that it is more important to be right than alive
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ALittleLight 7y agoI'm more concerned that the flare implies some instability that could presage a much more energetic event. I have extremely limited knowledge of space and astronomical phenomena, but super massive black holes seem like they may have enough mass/energy to cause problems for us in a worst possible case.