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Apparently 12 million light-years is near Earth. I know it's lame to comment on the single stupid thing in an article, but this is absurd.
by Grakel 5y ago
Apparently 12 million light-years is near Earth.
I know it's lame to comment on the single stupid thing in an article, but this is absurd.
- jessriedel 5y agoYea, "near Milky Way" would have been better. The closest galaxy (Andromeda) is 2.5 million light-years, so 12 million to Centaurus A is pretty close. It's also the fifth brightest galaxy in the sky, so "near" in that sense too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaurus_A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaurus_A
- hinkley 5y ago"In nearby galaxy" probably got canned by the editors, who as we all know from many many sessions of grumbling, often pick the titles without much input from the author.
- ncmncm 5y agoAlso, the stuff they are calling attention to is not, in fact, in any galaxy, and is monstrously bigger than any galaxy.
- ncmncm 5y ago12 million light years is near to Earth, as galaxies go. The overwhelming majority of the hundreds of billions of other galaxies are hundreds to thousands of times farther away.
- lifeformed 5y agoMentioning Earth is just weirdly specific, a mismatched precision. It's like saying a truck almost hit my left kidney, instead of just hitting me.
- leephillips 5y agoAt least they didn’t say, “near the White House.”
- hermitdev 5y agoAnd the truck that almost hit you was on the other side of the city at the time...
- ncmncm 5y agoEarth is a place of interest to most of us. People interested in the other side of the Milky Way, who might feel neglected, are not reading.
- sliken 5y agoHeh, well some familiarity with cosmology is assumed. All (AFAIK) supermassive blackholes are in the center of galaxies. By my math 99.987% of the universe is further away than 12 million light years. As mentioned in the article it's so big that from earth it's 16 times larger than the moon (as viewed from earth of course). Seems reasonable to consider 0.012% of the universe "near earth" when talking about galaxies or blackholes at the center of a galaxy.
- Grakel 5y agoThe nearest star is about 4 light years. So outside of the solar system, that should be "near." This thing is 3 million times that far.
- sliken 5y agoRight, but the article isn't about stars, it's about supermassive blackholes. The one in the article is like #5 or something out of trillions.