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Comment by cuSetanta | Hacker News Reader

Typically Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) with the jets pointed directly at Earth are referred to as Blazars. (https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8300/7754600044_e7635a1c8f.jp...)

But this event seems to be something a little different. Its a lot closer to us than a lot of blazars typically are, and the emission seems to infer a different source than is typically seens for blazars.

Quite an interesting paper, will be cool to see how this might change our understanding of AGN and accretion of matter onto such objects.

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>referred to as Blazars

For me, legitimately one of the best names for anything ever. First time I heard the word it gave me goosebumps lol.

How about blazer? Any reaction to that?

I'm partial to Thagomizer.

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

> The term thagomizer was coined by Gary Larson in jest. In a 1982 The Far Side comic, a group of cavemen are taught by a caveman lecturer that the spikes on a stegosaur's tail were named "after the late Thag Simmons".

My 5 year old surprised me when she pointed to the spikes on a dinosaur tail and said ‘that’s the thagomizer’. I knew about the cartoon and that it’d been adopted as the official term, but somehow wasn’t expecting it to be taught in primary schools as standard dino anatomy.

thagomizer is a lot more fun to say than something technical like "distal tail bone spikes" or something similar.

Distal Coccygeal Osteophytes

I love that band.

I met their lead singer, Spike.

The name comes from BL Lacertae (the prototypical object) and Quasar (A kind of Active Galactic Nucleus, that name is for quasi stellar, which it really isn't...)

So you could say they're... Star Blazars?

"We’re off to outer space... We’re leaving mother Earth... To save, the human race! Our Star Blazers!"

(OK, so the spelling is off. But since I'm going to be humming this the rest of the day, might as well see if there's some 80s kids out there that will join in with me.)

> seems to infer

You mean "seems to imply".

> Its a lot closer to us than a lot of blazars typically are

And the article says:

> The source is also the farthest TDE ever detected, at some 8.5 billion lights years away—more than halfway across the universe.

So this is the farthest TDE, but most Blazars are even further away than "halfway across the universe"?

88% of the volume of the universe is more than halfway across the universe. Assuming a spherical universe with us at the center.

Observable Universe.

There's likely considerably more unobservable Universe.

Blazars are some of the brightest objects in the sky, and some of the furthest from us (think the furthest object I studied was at a redshift of 6 or so). They can also be difficult to pinpoint in terms of distance due to their flat spectra.

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