[geeky4qwerty]

"From a rough calculation, the flash appeared to give off more light than 1,000 trillion suns."

Can any space geeks chime in on this one?

Does this mean the emission of light from the sun at a single point in time x 10^15? My brain pretty much divides by zero even trying to comprehend such a large number and I'm just trying to grasp the relationship of the emitted light to our sun.

[cuSetanta]

As others have said, its not quite the same as the Sun's output, but it is still an incredible amount of light.

I have studied blazars fairly extensively in the past and you are right that the brain cant really fathom the 'real world' appearance of these things. I resort to just thinking in terms of number of photons and avoid thinking about the rest, as it tends to result in a lot of existential dread and drinking.

[dredmorbius]

One way of thinking about this is in terms of incident sunlight at Earth's orbit.

A trillion is a rather large number. Some quick maths says that 1,000 trillion cm^2 is 100,000 km^2, or a region roughly 315 km on a side (195 miles), or a circle with a radius of about 126 km (77 mi).

Alternatively, if you consider sunlight falling on a patch of ground for one second, the amount reaching it over 1 trillion seconds would take about 32,000 years.

So think in terms of a very large magnifying glass (I'd suggest considering a Fresnel lens for economy's sake), or a very long-term accumulator.

[dylan604]

> My brain pretty much divides by zero even trying to comprehend such a large number

I've tried using this line in the wrong company that wasn't math oriented, and it fell flat.

It's also amusing your use of this phrase, as in a lot of the astronomy circles I've seen/read, there's a joke that black holes are where god divided by zero. So it felt very apropos to me in this context too.

[londons_explore]

That would be assuming the same amount of light was emitted in all directions. But we have no indication that that was the case.

[jvanderbot]

I roughly translate this to 10^15 x more photons per square meter of surface area at some standard distance.

[yourapostasy]

Whoah, this goes way beyond Sarah Connor: "Anybody not wearing two million sunblock is gonna have a real bad day".