re: #55 Ojoe

Notice that the reporter leaves out the area factor, energy per unit of area. You must specify that or the statement has little meaning.

The energy of visible light measured where? Just outside the Earth’s atmosphere? On the beach at sea level in LA in June?

&c. &c.

The most ignorant people are journalists these days.

What he was trying to say was that the color of the light was extra super blue. As in, ordinary photons from our sun are yellow or green, for the most part. That frequency. Some red and some blue. But the photons we’re getting from that event, coming to us through the Carina constellation but from a far distant galaxy, are not blue. They’re not UV. Red to Blue to UV is two factors of 2 in frequency. Now you have to upshift the frequency, doubling it repeatedly another 30 times. So, this is UVUVUVUVUVUVUVUVUVUVUVUVUVUVUVUVUVUVUVUVUVUVUVUVUVUVUVUVUVUV colored light. And enough of it to be 9 kilo-supernovas worth of energy.

One such photon carries little enough energy. You’d need nearly a trillion of the little suckers to amount to the food value of 1 (kilo)-calorie. But there were a lot of photons coming out of this event.

Cut the journalist a bit of slack, though. It’s not easy to write this so that the eyes of the non-lizard reading public don’t glaze over.