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When they say "pointing straight toward Earth", is that hyperbole? Or are they actually saying that by pure random chance, out of all the possible directions th
by baobabKoodaa 4y ago
When they say "pointing straight toward Earth", is that hyperbole? Or are they actually saying that by pure random chance, out of all the possible directions this thing could have taken, it just happens to be pointed directly at earth?
- cogwheel 4y agoThe beam is surely wider than the planet so there's a large range of "straight toward"
- cuSetanta 4y agoYeah this is pretty much the case. The important thing is that the light from the beam is sufficicently bright that it is not possible to resolve the surrounding region of space to see more detail.
- baobabKoodaa 4y agoIf I point a flashlight directly at you, that's different from me pointing the flashlight at the person standing next to you. Even though in both cases the beam will light you up.
- dotnet00 4y agoBut that becomes effectively the same thing if the flashlight is being pointed in your direction from 10km away and it's reasonable to just describe it as pointing at you. Coming from 8 billion ly away, the beam is probably wide enough that it would appear to be pointed at the Milky Way in general.
- dan_mctree 4y agoIt should be at least broad enough to compensate for some movement of the earth, considering it was observed for at least some days
- bombcar 4y agoIt's 8 billion light years away, even if the beam was very focused by the time it reached us it is probably tens of thousands of lightyears wide.
- PKop 4y agoBut there are a lot of black holes yes? Surely some of them will point towards us.
- Cpoll 4y agoDepends on the width of the beam. If it's as wide as a laser pointer, the odds of it hitting anything are infinitesimal. When something's a light year away, changing the bearing of the laser by a degree will cause you to miss it by hundreds of thousands of kilometers. Or to rephrase, to hit something a light year away you'll have to get the heading accurate to many decimal points. (Exercise left to the reader, it's high school trigonometry, but I'm rather lazy).
- PKop 4y agoIt's also a statistical question that involves how many black holes there are. Do you have a strong sense of that number, because I sure don't? Quick search says there are a very large amount of black holes but maybe not so many super-massive that produce these beams of light so eh, who knows.