Super Long Gas Stream

[taiwan_girl]

The M87 galaxy is monstrous.

It contains several trillions of stars, compared to our Milky Way's hundreds of billions. And the supermassive black hole at its center is shooting an outstretched beam of energy into space. The Hubble Space Telescope, operated by NASA and the European Space Agency, has captured a new image of this energetic cosmic event, which produces a beam of superheated gas 3,000 light-years long (a single light-year is nearly 6 trillion miles).

(Knowing you guys, I will be disappointed if nobody has any funny comments. )

[89th]

Hard to even grasp that. The beam of light itself, just to go from one end to the other, takes 3,000 years. So the light you see on the right, first started its journey from the middle back when David was King of Israel.

Wait, let's go further. The light we are seeing in this photo actually occurred 55 million years ago. Which means, we are seeing in M87 what happened back when there was still a Pangea supercontinent... and even crazier, the light you see in that photo started 11 million years after dinosaurs went extinct.

[Horace]

That puts things into perspective.

[bachophile]

So the light you see on the right, first started its journey from the middle back when David Bibi was King of Israel.

Fixed it for you