Astronomers reported that they identified an extremely powerful cosmic explosion as powerful as a billion suns only after seeing its delayed "echo", rather than the initial blast itself

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• ButteryMonkey@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  The scientists were able to track the origin of this explosive event to a small, bright *galaxy* located around 1.7 light-years away. The galaxy has an irregular structure and is in the midst of intense star formation.

  Methinks they fucked up their distance units here. 1.7 light years is really close cosmically speaking. That’s closer than Alpha Centauri, which is 4.246ly away and the closest non-sun star to earth…

  So I wonder where it ACTUALLY was. I’m guessing they forgot “million” in there.. 1.7 million light years away is far far more likely, but with magnitudes of 10 billion suns, it could very well have been 1.7 billion light years away, as that would put it much earlier in the universe when those ultramassive stars and systems were more common.

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• hanrahan@slrpnk.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  10 billion suns… anything but metric /s

  I had a YT video playing in the corner of my PC screen the other day with Professor Brian Cox opining about the Fermi Paradox and he mentioned in passing that “the universe is a particularly violent place” seems an understatement now.

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