Solar Flare Interference From 45k Lightyears Away

Wan2Be writes "Nasa has a story about a solar flare on Aug. 27 that affected our planet with radio bounces and blackouts - but it wasn't from old Sol, it was from SGR 1900+14, a neutron star about 45,000 light years away. "

Comments

Re:Have they got the numbers right ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, since we are talking about electromagnetic radiation, the energy will drop with the sqaure of the distance, not the cube. This might impact your calculations just a little bit.

- GK

This was 5 years ago

[Skapare]

When I saw this story on Slashdot, I was trying to think back to having experienced any radio effects back on 27 August, but I couldn't recall any. Then I read the article and saw that it was really a 1998 event only being written about just now, 5 years later. From an academic study perspective, that's fine. The article is about these effects in general and the study being made of them. The 27 August 1998 event was merely an example of one that played a significant role. And as they report, there have been 10 of these since, and the potential for much larger ones.

Re:Just to clear something up

[Viadd]

In this case, the ionospheric disturbance was from the X-rays and gamma-rays (high energy photons, travelling at lightspeed) hitting the atmosphere. The main part of the pulse was a huge spike of gamma-rays, followed by bright tail of periodically varying gamma-rays (with the neutron star's ~5 second rotation period) decaying in the next few minutes.

If there were a pulse of sub-light particles coming from the SGR, they would be no longer be a short pulse when they reached Earth fro two reasons: The particles travelling at 90% of lightspeed would come many years before the particles travelling at 89.99% of lightspeed; And the tangled magnetic field of the Galaxy would bend their paths all over the place so they'd be travelling different distances.

Re:Cajun Blackened Astronaut

[Viadd]

What sort of radiation dose would an astronaut receive if he was located outside the Van Allen Belt?

I worked it out once. This particular SGR burst would have given an astronaut the equivalent of a dental X-ray. Pretty potent for half-way across the Galaxy, but not a health hazard. And the Van Allen Belts wouldn't have provided any shielding because the X-rays/gamma-rays are uncharged photons, which aren't affected by Earth's magnetosphere.

Solar flares are most deadly because of the proton flux, which would be blocked, but which travels much slower than lightspeed. If you see X-rays from a solar flare, it tells you that you have an hour or so to get into a shielded environment before the big storm hits.