350 trillion times luminosity of the sun?! I can’t even comprehend that! What would that look like at the distance of our sun?!

It doesn’t work like that since this is on a galactic scale, the only thing you need for a galaxy to be 350 trillion times as luminous as the sun is a galaxy with 350 trillion stars which are just as luminous as the sun.

Form an intra galactic viewpoint it wouldn’t look much different (at least to a human observer) and the only luminosity that you would really care about would still be your local star unless you are really close to something special that can cook you.

Now, if you want to know what it would look like if the Sun suddenly became 350 trillion times more luminous, I think would probably look like your entire body melting/evaporating in seconds.

I think it would be faster than that. Normal luminosity is roughly one kilowatt per square meter. This would be roughly 3.5e17 W/m^s. The largest nuclear bomb ever detonated was around 2e16 joules, so it would be like getting a Tsar Bomba to the face ten times a second.

It seems like quasars like this we’re a lot more common in the early universe— I wouldn’t be surprised if our own galaxy was the result of a process like that billions of years ago.

so fascinating.. suns swallowing up other suns .. galaxies swallowing up other galaxies!! the size of these celestial objects is immense.. so hard to get my head around

Indeed, awesome observations.

Sometime this also happens using the "intergalactic transport network", a technical team which actually exists, exploiting low-energy transfer trajectories. See for instance http://www2.esm.vt.edu/~sdross/papers/AmericanScientist2006.... (especially its last page; sorry for linking to http) or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4NTjTxdNug.

Very nice work by the astronomers doing the observation. It would better if the article calls it galaxy merger instead cannibalization.

Phys.org isn’t a popsci publication, it’s a press release aggregator for scientific publications.

This is a press release from the NRAO.

https://public.nrao.edu/news/2018-alma-luminous-streamers/

Also in this case luminosity is exactly the correct term as it describes the intrinsic brightness (how much light is emitted in a given unit of time) of an object not its appearent brightess (how bright it is to the observer) which is affected by distance and other factors.

Why

"...those galaxies will escape their fate." --- I just found it odd that the author of this article anthropomorphized the galaxies.