"Oh, dear. Have I made an error in time?
How... fallible of me!"
Ok if the flare's light took 2.1 billions years to reach earth then the star has to be AT LEAST 2.1 billion years old right? THe story reports the star is only a billion years old..... Bad journalism. I'll bet he is a "warmist" too.
you’re innocently committing a fallacy by assuming it’s still there. you’re essentially looking into the past. it is likely gone by now.
"Oh, dear. Have I made an error in time?
How... fallible of me!"
Good catch! From the 4th paragraph of the ScienceNOW story:
"...the black hole is about 3 million times more massive than our sun..."
I went to the abstract linked in the 4th paragraph
:"The black hole has a mass of about two million solar masses..."
He must have been a journalism najor. You must be able to count in most of the sciences.
The star could have been just a billion years old and it and the black hole are 2.1 billion light years away.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
The star was “born” and then killed by the black hole over its billion year lifecycle at 2.1 billion years distance.
I would assume they use the lifespan of other similar stars to determine how old this one star was. They obviously wouldn’t have seen it until the flare of it’s death
The black hole and the star are indeed 2.1 billion light years away, however, the star was just a bunch of hydrogen gas until gravity pulled it into a ball and it ignited a billion years ago.