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Comment by Grakel | Hacker News Reader

Apparently 12 million light-years is near Earth.

I know it's lame to comment on the single stupid thing in an article, but this is absurd.

Yea, "near Milky Way" would have been better. The closest galaxy (Andromeda) is 2.5 million light-years, so 12 million to Centaurus A is pretty close. It's also the fifth brightest galaxy in the sky, so "near" in that sense too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaurus_A

"In nearby galaxy" probably got canned by the editors, who as we all know from many many sessions of grumbling, often pick the titles without much input from the author.

Also, the stuff they are calling attention to is not, in fact, in any galaxy, and is monstrously bigger than any galaxy.

12 million light years is near to Earth, as galaxies go. The overwhelming majority of the hundreds of billions of other galaxies are hundreds to thousands of times farther away.

Mentioning Earth is just weirdly specific, a mismatched precision. It's like saying a truck almost hit my left kidney, instead of just hitting me.

At least they didn’t say, “near the White House.”

And the truck that almost hit you was on the other side of the city at the time...

Earth is a place of interest to most of us. People interested in the other side of the Milky Way, who might feel neglected, are not reading.

Heh, well some familiarity with cosmology is assumed. All (AFAIK) supermassive blackholes are in the center of galaxies.

By my math 99.987% of the universe is further away than 12 million light years. As mentioned in the article it's so big that from earth it's 16 times larger than the moon (as viewed from earth of course).

Seems reasonable to consider 0.012% of the universe "near earth" when talking about galaxies or blackholes at the center of a galaxy.

The nearest star is about 4 light years. So outside of the solar system, that should be "near." This thing is 3 million times that far.

Right, but the article isn't about stars, it's about supermassive blackholes. The one in the article is like #5 or something out of trillions.

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