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A comment on Milky Way’s Black Hole Just Flared, Growing 75 Times as Bright for a Few Hours. Parent comment

Re:Milky Way’s Black Hole Just Flared, Growing 75 Times as B... by luc4sdreyer on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @07:10PM (#20691188)
> 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.
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Re:Milky Way’s Black Hole Just Flared, Growing 75 Times as B... by dnadler on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @10:17PM (#20692174)
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.
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Re:Milky Way’s Black Hole Just Flared, Growing 75 Times as B... by Eriksrocks on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @10:52PM (#20692343)
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....

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Re:Milky Way’s Black Hole Just Flared, Growing 75 Times as B... by dnadler on Thursday August 22, 2019 @11:50AM (#20769426)
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

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Re:Milky Way’s Black Hole Just Flared, Growing 75 Times as B... by dwaltrip on Wednesday August 14, 2019 @01:48AM (#20693001)
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!"

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