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

Just to clear something up

[erpbridge]

Slight misconception from the summary. The event happened on August 27.

But that was August 27, 1998. Not just a couple weeks ago.

Hams were first to notice

[M1FCJ]

Isn't it interesting that radio amateurs were one of the first groups noticed there was something strange going on?

Re:45,000 light years away?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

It can't.

The fastest way for any information to travel (again, as far as we know) is as light. Period. So if the event that's happening is a propagating wavefront of light, nothing is going to get to us before the light itself. ("Light" here including other parts of the EM spectrum: radio, X-rays, whatever.)

Let's suppose that at the halfway point, ~22,500 LY away, the wavefront had some effect -- say, it hit a cloud of interstellar gas and caused that gas to fluoresce. Would we see that fluorescence? Maybe -- except while the light from that fluorescence is traveling toward us, so is the light from the original event. The light from the secondary events can't move any faster.

Okay, here's a terrestrial analogy. Let's suppose someone telephones me and says, "By the way, while I've got you on the line, I'm also calling Trigun on another phone." Now let's suppose I want to call you and warn you about this incoming call. (Maybe it's a bill collector.) No matter how quickly I try to call you, it doesn't matter, because the other guy has already placed the call. Does that make sense?