I was eating my lunch at work yesterday. I came upon this tiny article in the Boston Globe. It amazed me to realize this "pulse" of light from the dieing star described above was actually detected and that it was calculated to be THIS far away! Light travels 186,000 miles in one second. There are 3,600 seconds in an hour and 86,400 seconds in one day. There are 365.25 days in 1 year. Therefore, there are 31,557,600 seconds in a year. If we multiply 186,000 miles by a year's worth of seconds, we come up with 5,869,713,600,000 miles. This is how many miles a beam of light will travel in just 1 year. To say this more "simply," we can say light (in just one Light Year) will travel 5 trillion 869 billion 713 million 600 thousand miles. OK, now that you have that distance in your head, try multiplying that distance by 13.1 billion. This is how far away that object is from you right now (in miles). Lets see, that would be: 76,893,248,160,000,000,000,000 miles. Not your average trip to the grocery store! Tinyc may want to check my math. He may, if there is a name for it, be able to give us the other textual name for this number. Two other pieces of information seemed interesting to me. One was: the object was 30 times the size of our sun. The other was: the object itself -- with its bright "jet" of gamma rays (and light) became a black hole on April 23 - Dee Dee's and my birthday!
1 comment:
Your arithmetic appears to be flawless.
Here are my notes.
60*60*24*365.25 sec / year * 186000 miles / sec * 13.1*10^9 years =
6*6*2.4*3.6525*1.86*1.31*
10^(1+1+1+2+5+10) miles =
768.9324816 * 10^20 miles = 76,893,248,160,000,000,000,000 miles
The way to say and spell this number is
seventy-six sextillion eight hundred ninety-three quintillion two hundred forty-eight quadrillion one hundred sixty trillion
Here's a link you can use if and when you need to turn big numbers into written numbers.
big numbers
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