“a sprawling new galaxy cluster hiding in plain sight. The cluster, which sits a mere 2.4 billion light years from Earth”
In case you didn’t know, ONE light year, the distance light travels in a year, at its speed of 186,000 miles per second, works out to about 5.9 TRILLION miles.
Is something that scientists have believed for decades "settled science" ?
Was it hiding behind dark matter? /s
2.4 billion light years away. Well let me gas up my old Camry and we’ll get there some time next week.
“This might be a short-lived phase that clusters go through, where the central black hole has a quick meal, gets bright, and then fades away again,””
Well what ever we are seeing happened 2.4 billion years ago. So by now if you could travel there in an instant then you might find nothing left.
Are they sure it’s not an alien craft that just came out of stealth mode?
Something to remember is that these quasars are not emitting energy isotropically. They create relatively narrow and intense jets of visible light and other forms of energy.
If the relative positions of the solar system and the object are such that we’re looking down the throat of one of the two jets, the brightness we see will be much greater than physics could account for if it was being emitted in all directions (isotropically). The result of alignment with a jet is what we call a quasar. At first they were mysterious until the jets were figured out.
Well, no wonder. I had it in my Rolodex as PKS1353-342.
There’s nothing new under the sun.
As I get older, instead of getting used to the vastness and mystique of the Universe, I get more overawed at what God spoke into existence.