when will we smell it?

well even a black hole needs to relieve itself every now and again.

a black hole has been farting a gas bubble for the last 200,000 years or so....

now that's what i call a real ripper!

it's over 1,000 light years in diameter and growing at 1,000,000 kilometers per hour.

so how long till we get a whiff?

let's see...

the black hole is 12 million light years away.

a light year is how far light travels in a year, which is 9.46e+12 kilometers.

so,

moving at 1e+6 km/hr, it will take 9.46e+6 hrs to travel one light year,

multiply this by the distance of the bubble from us, namely 12e+6 light years, and it will take approximately 1.14e+14 hrs; a 114 trillion hours. a hundred-and-fourteen trillion hours!

if one lives to age 80 years (hopefully no longer since your pretty much just waiting for the end at that point anyways), that is equal to 700,800 hours.

so it will take 162 million lifetimes before we catch a whiff of the universes biggest fart.

to put that into perspective, in the past 5,000 years of recorded history, that equates to roughly 62 80-year lifetimes.

so breath deep, the cool crisp air of earth, before it's spoiled by the biggest fart imaginable.