Solar Flare Interference From 45k Lightyears Away

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Solar Flare Interference From 45k Lightyears Away

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday September 14, 2003 @01:56AM from the duck-the-flares-are-coming dept.

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. "

15 of 154 comments (clear)

Just to clear something up by erpbridge · 2003-09-14 02:02 · Score: 5, Insightful

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

But that was August 27, 1998. Not just a couple weeks ago.
1. Re:Just to clear something up by saynte · 2003-09-14 02:20 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Actually, if a person were to get picky, it happened August 27th, 45,000 years ago :D
2. Re:Just to clear something up by Vexalith · 2003-09-14 03:37 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  if one assume Warp 9 is possible
  
  That's quite an assumption!
3. Re:Just to clear something up by Viadd · 2003-09-14 05:40 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  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.
Country?? by FrostedWheat · 2003-09-14 02:07 · Score: 5, Funny

The station faded--a blackout--and was moments later replaced by country music

The universe has a sick sence of humour! High-energy solar flares are one thing, but country music? That's just cruel!
When you are driving home... by OneOver137 · 2003-09-14 02:11 · Score: 5, Funny

"in the middle of the night and, unexpectedly, a country tune blares out of your radio, you might wonder ... did a magnetar do that?" Or do you just have poor taste in music?
Re:Have they got the numbers right ? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-09-14 02:21 · Score: 4, Informative

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
Cajun Blackened Astronaut by Detritus · 2003-09-14 02:28 · Score: 4, Interesting

What sort of radiation dose would an astronaut receive if he was located outside the Van Allen Belt?
Solar flares were a serious concern to the Apollo astronauts, who were at risk while traveling to the Moon.

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Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
1. Re:Cajun Blackened Astronaut by Viadd · 2003-09-14 05:48 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  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.
This was 5 years ago by Skapare · 2003-09-14 02:30 · Score: 3, Informative

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.

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now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Hams were first to notice by M1FCJ · 2003-09-14 02:46 · Score: 4, Insightful

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? by Daniel+Dvorkin · 2003-09-14 03:04 · Score: 4, Insightful

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?

--
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Re:45,000 light years away? by Waffle+Iron · 2003-09-14 03:17 · Score: 3, Insightful

It had a lot of shit to go through in 45,000 years.
Not really. The interstellar medium has about 0.1 atoms per cm^3. This is about 1e20 times less then our atmosphere. 45000 light years is 4.2e22 cm, so it only had to go through the equivalent of 4.2 meters of our atmosphere.
So it's only the same amount of shit as it would encounter on a trip across your living room.
Re:Just goes to show you. by mskfisher · 2003-09-14 04:06 · Score: 4, Interesting

You've got that right.
If you're impressed by how these "magnetars" can affect us, check out gamma-ray bursters.

From http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/mnr/st /std086:
The integrated flux of the strongest burst, GB790305, was 10^-4 ergs/cm^2 (the time structure of this pulse was consistent with a
rotating or precessing neutron star; the period is about 8 seconds).
A lethal dose to unshielded astronauts would be about 4 x 10^6 ergs/cm^2, so anyone 200,000 closer to the burster than we were had
better have good shielding.

...

If the burster was at 5 billion light years (say), the lethal radius for unshielded astronauts would be around 25,000 light years. I hope one doesn't go off in our galaxy soon.
We might get beat up real good by one of those bad boys - the Earth could get cooked if one happened right outside our neighborhood.
Ah well, what's life without a little excitement? :)

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0x0D 0x0A
What if .. by agonz28 · 2003-09-14 05:55 · Score: 3, Interesting

Just wondering ... What if this event had to happen much closer to earth?
say 500 Light years ..
The magnetic storm woud be thousands of times more powerful
How would that affect life here on earth...