Shocking news from NASA tonight?

[DispatchDragon]

any one noticed how the Chandra video it resembles nothing less than the view on a Colonoscopy...I knew it I knew.... God is about to give someone an enema!!!

[DarrenL]

I was more intrigued by the cross-eyed bloke from NASA who was explaining it. He was a cross between Uncle Fester and Barry (eyes all over the place) from The Eggheads.

I missed the start and thought he was the "extraordinary find"

[airboatr]

It'san expression

It means the date is question was a week ago as of last thursday, in other word the Thursday before last

One common language? At least I knew that expression.

Nigel²

I knew what he was on about as well Mr ² , I was just av'n a go - don't ya know
also you don't really qualify for excuses of not knowing being an expat and all...

[DanKH]

Ahem ... 1 lightyear is a distance not a timeframe ..... 30 lightyears is the distance the light travels in 30 years with roughly 300.000 km/s so that equals .... well a lot of km's ... not a lot of years ...

Yeah I know .... "wise guy" ...

[Fodda]

Dan, you're right, but for the age of the star, the distance in light years and the age in years are directly comparable. As the light showing the black hole being born is 50,000 light years away, and travels toward us at light speed, it would take 50,000 years to reach us. hence we can say that the black hole is 50,000 years old... Give or take 30 years.

Admittedly that is the "pure" theory and light doesn't travel through space without being bent or diffused slightly which would add a tiny amount to that distance.

Of course, if it were anything travelling at other than the speed of light, then the distance-time relationship would have to be calculated. Something going from here to the black star at 10% of the speed of light (still the realm of science-fiction for us) then of course it would take 10 x 50,000 years to get there... 500,000 years in fact.

Or have I totally got what you've said wrong there?

[Garry Russell]

it's not unusual to use time as a measurement of distance

Sometimes it give people a better idea.....like 20mins away from the shops, or it's an hour on the bus.

[DarrenL]

it's not unusual to use time as a measurement of distance

Or distance as a measurement of time.

Like Han Solo doing the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.

[gordon-in-aberdeen]

Well, someone's going to have to ask the question then, so "what's a parsec?"
(other than something Han Solo says

[Chris Sykes]

straight from Wiki...

A light-year, also light year or lightyear (symbol: ly) is a unit of length, equal to just under 10 trillion kilometres (1016 metres, 10 petametres or 6 trillion miles). As defined by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a light-year is the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one Julian year.[1]

The light-year is often used to measure distances to stars and other distances on a galactic scale, especially in non-specialist and popular science publications. The preferred unit in astrometry is the parsec, because it can be more easily derived from, and compared with, observational data. The parsec is defined as the distance at which an object will appear to move one arcsecond of parallax when the observer moves one astronomical unit perpendicular to the line of sight to the observer, and is equal to approximately 3.26 light-years.[1]

Please note its a Julian year, being 365.25 days of 86,400 SI seconds each, totalling 31,557,600 seconds, not one of our dodgy 365 day years!

[DarrenL]

Well, someone's going to have to ask the question then, so "what's a parsec?"
(other than something Han Solo says

The Kessel Run is 18 Parsecs long, he said he did it in 12.

So an analogy could be a journey in a straight line that's 18 miles long. He can't do it in less distance than it actually is, an 18 mile distance in only 12 miles.