Does your brain hurt right now? Unless you’re an astrophysicist, watching the video below should make your brain hurt if it isn’t already. The universe is an amazing thing, expanding and shifting in ways that make measuring the distances between stars and galaxies extremely complex. It’s not a one-step process – all of the data from different forms of distances measurement must be combined to form a broader picture of how far objects are from the Earth. That’s the gist. The video goes into much more detail but not so much detail that you need to (literally) be a rocket scientist to understand it….

In late March 2011, NASA’s Swift satellite alerted astronomers to intense and unusual high-energy flares from a new source in the constellation Draco. They soon realized that the source, which is now known as Swift J1644+57, was the result of a truly extraordinary event — the awakening of a distant galaxy’s dormant black hole as it shredded and consumed a star. The galaxy is so far away that the radiation from the blast has traveled 3.9 billion years before reaching Earth. Speculative video representations of something unseen are often weak at best and completely wrong at worst. When NASA steps…