3 ms·
It's amazing given the lifespan of celestial entities that we can witness such significant change in such seemingly human time scales (2 hours). The milky way
by thelittleone 7y ago
It's amazing given the lifespan of celestial entities that we can witness such significant change in such seemingly human time scales (2 hours).
The milky way galaxy is estimated to be ~13.7B years old. The black hole was brighter for a 2 hours. That event, as a percentage of the milky way's age represents: 0.00000000000001666500016665%.
As a comparison of what that represents as a unit of time in an average human lifespan (79 years) it equals:
0.00000069197080291971 seconds.
0.00069197080291971 milliseconds.
0.69197080291971 microseconds.
- simonh 7y agoI think a better comparison is to the size of the region in which this event occurred. For the event to appear to last only 2 hours to us, it can't have occurred in a region more than 2 light hours across. That's only 14 astronomical units, less than the diameter of the orbit of Saturn. There are stars bigger than that.