Any such radiation would have arrived with the light of the black hole flaring. The fact that you're alive to read this implies that nothing fatal happened.

I'm more concerned that the flare implies some instability that could presage a much more energetic event. I have extremely limited knowledge of space and astronomical phenomena, but super massive black holes seem like they may have enough mass/energy to cause problems for us in a worst possible case.

Maybe some people did die, it's a bit too early to tell if it killed, say ten people. It's probably very unlikely though.

More importantly, there is a very wide spectrum of danger between death and no effect, especially when you consider things like cancer. I assumed that was the point of the grandparent's question.

X-class flares from our sun are 10E32 or so ergs. The black hole flares were roughly 10E35 ergs, about a thousand times more energetic but they are about a billion times farther away than our sun. Apply N^2 law and . . .

The amount of radiation you received from the Sagittarius flares is almost indescribably tiny. Many, many orders of magnitude less than the cosmic ray background radiation that we already live with. If you didn't have a sensor pointed right at the BH, you wouldn't be able to distinguish it from the noise.

Sounds like we should all just stay inside to be safe from the blackholes. That suits me just fine

you don't know that different frequencies of radiation aren't associated with different phases of a multistage event that play out over the course of a day or a month or a century.

No, this event occurred in the infrared, not at gamma wavelengths.

No more so than you usually are. Which means it can happen to you at any time.

So you're saying that this event told us nothing whatsoever about the state and stability of these things?

Sure it could always happen at any time, that's not a very useful thing to say. More interesting is what this event teaches us, if anything.

Not an astronomer but my understanding is that at any moment life on earth could be totally destroyed by things from space.

* An undetected high velocity object * Radation bursts

The thing is that since space is so big, we would have to be extremely unlikely to get hit. If a radation burst was directional it would still be like blindly throwing a dart and hitting a bullseye 24,000 light years away in this case.

I believe it's possible for our Sun to emit a solar flare large enough to kill us too (this is far more likely then radiation from a blackhole killing us because its magnitudes closer).

> it would still be like blindly throwing a dart and hitting a bullseye 24,000 light years away in this case.

I liked this analogy, so I felt inspired to calculated the odds. Particularly: the percentage of the "sky" (celestial sphere) that is covered by the Earth from Sagittarius A* 's perspective. That's equal to the two dimensional projection of the Earth onto a 26000 ly sphere around Sagittarius A*.

  cover% = π x (6371km)^2 / (4 x π x (26000 x 9.46 x 10^12 km)^2) x 100%
  = 1.677 x 10^-26 % 

I tried to put that number into "human terms", but the best I could come up with is it's the same as the width of a hair at Saturn's orbit, viewed from Earth.

Slightly off topic, but one of my favorite solar system facts is that the with of Saturn's rings can be measured in feet. They are much thinner than I ever expected.

Sure, if you consider 3,200 feet as "measured in feet" [1]. Anything can technically be measured in feet. When you said that I assumed you meant they were like 20-30 feet thick, not over half a mile.

[1] http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/ask/108-How-large-are-Sat....

From a NASA website[0]: Saturn’s rings are incredibly thin. The main rings are generally only about 30 feet (10 meters) thick, though parts of the main and other rings can be more than a mile, or several kilometers, thick.

[0] https://hubblesite.org/quick-facts/all-quick-facts

That's still pretty damn thin, relative to the size of the rings. An interesting quote from your link:

"If you had a model of Saturn that was a meter stick wide (3 feet), its rings would be about 10,000 times thinner than a razor blade!"

Do you feel some burning sensation?