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Huge Star Quake Rocks Milky Way
SJrX writes "The BBC is reporting that scientists have detected "the biggest explosion observed by humans within [the past 400 years]". The explosion luckily occured about 50,000 light years away form us, on the far side of the Milky Way, as the article goes on to say that had the explosion been within 10 light years of us, it "would possibly have triggered a mass extinction.""
Of course the existence of magnetars will place constraints on estimations of life on other planets like the Drake equation, and it might be useful to map out these sources of potential periodic radiation bursts to limit/make more efficient radio/laser surveys of the sky.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
The explosion luckily occured about 50,000 light years away form us, on the far side of the Milky Way, as the article goes on to say that had the explosion been within 10 light years of us, it "would possibly have triggered a mass extinction."
Yeah... that would have been a real loss.
(Yes folks, I'm just that bitter.)
Great, Now all the Aliens are dead. We are truely alone.
Is Star Wars in are backyard? Be warned the Sith are coming.
They mean in the past 50,000 years, since the star is 50,000 light-years away, it didn't happen 400 years ago, but rather 50,000 years ago.
Ok, I'm nitpicking, but I didn't see enough pretty pictures.
Without a proper flamewar, Anonymous was undecided on what shell to run.
Our Star Wars missle defense system worked, succesfully detonating the oncoming warheads 50,000 light years away!
Let's say 50Kly is as far away as this starquake can be (obviously not). And they happen on a 10ly granularity. That's something like 1 in 50K^3/10, or 1.25E13 to 1 against it happening in 400 years. Staring down the barrels of nuclear and Greenhouse extinction in the next century, I'll take those odds.
--
make install -not war
Apparently there's no Magnetars anywhere near Earth, and I'm wondering, since this star was 'the other side of the galactic center', could such things possibly be closer to the center than we thought? Would this explain what we currently think is the gravity of a central black hole?
Oh, and check out the New Scientist article.
If such a thing were to occur closer by, all we have to do is put the Iraqi Information Minister on the job. He'll have everyone convinced that everything is fine even as the Earth is crumbling around them.
And if you believe that, I've got some lands in the Everglades to sell you...
I blame Oprah.
just before the explosion:
"Damn you, you bloody baboon!"
If the sun was only 10 kilometres from your house, a mass extinction might occur.
Seriously, this has to be the most bizzare astronomy story tagline I've ever read. I figured this was the submitter's quote, or possibly the article writer - nope, it was from one of the physicists.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Come on, give me a break. I've seen some of the science being done on this flare. There are enough cool things without being needlessly sensational, and invoking the Wipe-Out-All-Civilization radius definitely counts as sensational. After all, isn't the nearest magnetar something like 5 kiloparsecs away?
Microsoft delenda est!
That was a close one
The population of the universe per capita is Zero, so none of this matters.
I though that the New scientist article on it was a bit more informative.
TFA said that it was 10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts... how powerful is that compared to the Hiroshima bomb? Seriously. It just doesn't sound all that powerful when it's measured in the same units as my microwave.
Not sure if you're trolling, but IIRC, the Sun is 8 light minutes from us (or maybe 8.5, depending on who you ask). So three times the distance would be 24 light minutes.
Yeah, I saw it happen. Like there was this blinding flash. It was just fucking brilliant. Better living through astronomy, that's what I say. It's better than sex, drugs, and bungy jumpin'. Fuckin' far out.
if this galaxy is a rockin' don't come a knockin'....
Armchairgenius.com - Where everyone is a genius.
industrial accidents.
...what happened to the data on all my magnetic media?
We've all been wondering what they're gonna try and blow up next... now we know.
So I'm thinking I'm wrong, but I'm sure someone here knows: 50,000 light years... does that mean the explosion happened 50,000 Earth years ago, and cause light is so damn slow, we're just now seeing the blast? Or are light years and Earth years not equal?
10 light years = 631000 times Earth-Sun distance...
Mind you, 10 light years IS extremely local by most astronomical standards. Depends who you talk to though, the definition of "local" varies from inside the asteroid belt to a redshift of 1 (i.e. 6x10^9 light years away).
There are only 12 stars within 10 light years, including the Sun, as any scientist/Elite 2 player will tell you. There are billions of stars in the Milky Way.
you mean more like 39420000 times the distance from us to the sun. (roughly).
It's spin rapidly and accreting matter from a companion. It should go through the quark stage before becoming a black hole.
10 light years is really close... Thats like only 3 times the distance form us to the sun.
Considering that it takes 8 mins for light from the sun to reach Earth, I think your calculations are a bit off.
365 days x 24 hours x 60 mins = 525600 mins/year
525600 mins/year x 10 years = 5256000 mins
5256000 mins / 8 mins = 6.57x10^6 times
Therefore 10 light years is actually 6.57x10^6 times the distance from us to the sun.
QED
Live forever, or die trying.
whoops, i forgot to divide by 60. scratch that =oP
Thanks goodness for Atmosphere. It has protected us once again!
ps. It happened in August 1998. Back then it was SGR1900+14. Apparently a weaker event, but it knocked our socks off back then.
Did anyone else think that maybe we just saw the end of a Disaster Area Concert from the back row?
Correction: 6.57x10^5 times
Live forever, or die trying.
From the article
One calculation has the giant flare on SGR 1806-20 unleashing about 10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts.
Very impressive but as reading those consecutive huge "units", I just had to:
Dr Evil: I'll hold the world ransom for.....
1 Hundread, Billion, Trillion TRiLLion TRILLION Dollars! *pinky*
Just FYI, GRBs are extremely short (on the order of minutes) events that release huge amounts of gamma rays. There are many different types of these GRBs, some lasting longer than others, some related to quasars, but they are still quite a mystery.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
would this have been visible to the unaided eye if all the energy had been released in the visible spectrum?
"10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts" - BBC
"0.25-second flash" - New Scientist
Does this mean 10^40 Joules aka a bit more than duodecillion joules?
10 light years = 632,396.717 Astronomical Units
Straight from the Google's mouth (well... I added a comma)
Huge Rock Star Plays Quake, Eats Milky Way
.. wait a minute... never mind..
*blink*
huge rock star.. do they mean he's really fat, or really popular..
hey
Badly Edited Slashdot Headline strikes again!!!
This is probably a troll, but...can't restrain the urge...
10 light years is around 632,428.7 times as far from Earth as Sol is.
There. I feel better now.
had the explosion been within 10 light years of us, it "would possibly have triggered a mass extinction."
Dang! Extinction has an upside -- it would be nice to start over and ditch the red-state, blue-state stuff and perhaps come out better for starting anew. Maybe the next batch of primordial ooze will grow up smarter than us, and perhaps along the way find something less verbose than XML in the process!
This is offtopic and I'm karma burning, yeah, but you all just have to read this, it's 1337 the microsoft way... one of the funniest things I have read in a long time.
the link
Le français vous intéresse?
So that's where Iraq was keeping their weapons of mass destruction! I bet Bush feels pretty dumb for looking everywhere but up!
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
...I regret to inform you that in order to make room for the hyperspace express route...
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
A sad day indeed. Drudge Repor "News for nerds. stuff that matters".
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
No wonder a big disturbance in the force was felt...
Radiation.
somebody took out the Borg.
Worst... Post... Ever....
They mean that one of that magnitude hadn't been observed in the past 400 years because before that they wouldn't have been able to. Of course other large explosions have probably hit earth of that size before then, and yes, that explosion happened 50,000 years ago, but who would have known to observe gamma and xrays 50,000 years ago?
>>> 10 light years = 631000 times Earth-Sun distance...
:-)
>>> you mean more like 39420000 times the distance from us to the sun. (roughly).
>>> Therefore 10 light years is actually 6.57x10^6 times the distance from us to the sun.
>>> 10 light years is around 632,428.7 times as far from Earth as Sol is.
The people on slashdot sound so smart.
No wonder my dog rolled over. I was worried.
According to TFA this shit happened 50000 years ago. Is this some kind of slashdot record, posting news that mattered 50K years ago?
If anyone wants to cruise for mod points, you could do an order-of-magnitude estimate of the fraction of irradiated stars using the age and total volume of the Milky Way, the mean time between SGR flares of this magnitude (call it a decade to a century), and the radius of OMG-We're-All-Gonna-Die that was specified in the article.
Of course, the supernova explosion that led to a magnetar's formation would would have already done quite a bit of damage to the surrounding area, so they aren't likely to have any meaningful impact on any planetary systems around them anyway.
Microsoft delenda est!
With what little understanding we have of Universe, I seriously wonder if this ties in any way to the Tsunami. Remember, it happened only hours before this was "recorded", depending on where you were on this planet.
;)
Either that or God was just drinking too much of the haterade.
Only half the planet would be radiated to death.
... according to Neville Holmes (UTAS). :-)
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
I'm from the Bush administration. Put that in terms of burning Libraries of Congress.
Infuriate left and right
Perhaps. In the conceivable future people may rise above their collective arrogance, conceit and hubris to invent a machine which enables the downtrodden and dispossessed to answer these difficult ponderings.
1.light-year:a unit of length in interstellar astronomy equal to
the distance that light travels in one year in a vacuum or about
5 878 000 000 000 miles.
2.speed-of-light:
AHHHHHHHH
The REPUBLICAN ATTACK MACHINE is almost at full force! Soon you will feel the power of the dark side! (c'mon laugh, you know you want to)
Trigger a mass extinction? Wouldn't that be redundant?
Noooooooooooo! ET was killed in mass extinction. Now the ugly finger glowing midget is out of show-biz. *cries*
Fallout 3 will suck.
This happened 50,000 years ago and it is just now being posted to Slashdot? :)
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
We don't even know if our models of physics are correct.
Table-ized A.I.
as if millions of stars suddenly blinked out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
OK, so if it would have happened, wouldn't have technically been on Dec. 27 1994 (assuming that was the date it would have hit us?)
Disclaimer: IANAAP (I am not a astro-physicist)
At least it's not a repost. :D
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that this was FORM us, and not FROM us.
Slashdot speak is so in right now.
People of SGR 1806-20, your attention please. This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council.
Plans for development if the outlying regions of the galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system, and regrettably your star is scheduled for demolition.
The process will take slightly less that two of your SGR 1806-20 minutes. Thank you.
They make this thing out to be so powerful, what happened to them? Did they end up like those flies I caught in the microwave?
And it still would be George Bush's fault, right?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
From the article:
This is a once-in-a-lifetime event
I bet the aliens who lived less than 10 light-years from there couldn't possibly deny what you just said.
it wasnt me I swear I didnt fart.....dont look at me like that.
10 light years is 3 times the distance from earth to the sun? Light takes approx. 8 minutes to reach the earth from the sun. Thus, the earth is 8 light-minutes from the sun. Thus, the earth is not 3.33- light years from the sun.
...mod him\her appropriately.
We know that's in a different galaxy... far far away...
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
...across our galaxy, aliens are sitting there laughing, saying "Stupid humans. They just don't get our april fools jokes."
FLR
"It's Praxis, sir. It's a klingon moon."
if it had only been 10 light years away, it would have happened 49,990 years ago.
For all I know, one did happen back then. There is a mysterious mass extinction within a few thousand years of that time. Up until now I thought it was a result of a mega-volcano... but now I wonder.
I remember reading about the variable star Eta Carinae, which has varied greatly in brightness over the years. It varies because it's a huge, unstable star that has already blown off a big gas nebula. It's expected to go supernova eventually. One scientist claims that it's close enough to bathe the earth in so much gamma radiation that the nitrogen in the upper atmosphere turns into NOx, and the sky becomes opaque. Like in the Matrix.
Google for pix of thy Doom.
At an estimated cost of 3 cents per kilowatt/hour, that would put the total cost at $8.3 billion trillion trillion, which is more than the Galactic Lending Limit.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
>> "the biggest explosion observed by humans within [the past 400 years]...would possibly have triggered a mass extinction."
Well, I did warn her to go easy on the onions. They always do that to me.
Welcome to Friday Night on Slashdot.org.
Synergy is your friend
The only thing that can generate that kind of electricity is a magnetar flare! Unfortunately you never now when and where there going to strike.
Doh!
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Has this been the biggest explosion on the other side of Beta Carotene since Red dye #4?
Sing a song in the age of paranoia....well maybe not. They just might DRM it
. . . are those British trillions or American trillions? ;)
...this would have on the Earth at close range, courtesy a really smart guy who posted on POE News.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
By my count there are only eleven stars within ten light years of the sun... Sure, if one of them happened to experience the same sudden phenomenon we'd be screwed, but the poster makes it sounds like it's likely.
Read jack phelps dot net
How did it affect the astronauts/cosmonauts on the ISS?
Try eMusic. DRM free, legal, MP3 downloads.
Google for light year, astronomical unit, divide the two and multiply by 10. You get 632396.7165
:)
1: is pretty good. Wrong in the last place.
2: is wrong, and probably sarcasm
3: is a factor of 10 out, plus some change
4: is actually the closest, but gives the answer to 7 places when it's wrong in the fourth. So, it's more wrong than 1: i.e. it claims an accuracy of + or - 0.05, and is out by 32, that's a factor of 640. 1: (presumably, though it's not actually using standard form) claims + or - 500 and is 1396.7 out - a mere factor of 2.8
Therefore, after some consideration (and in the anticipation of controversy), the drxray prize for accuracy in pointless calculation goes to Mr Anonymous Coward!*
*unless someone's found a Mersenne Prime recently
Slashdot - Mutual Assured Discussion
"... unleashing about 10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts"
Wow! This event released a massive ammount of energy.
With lesser "solar flares" from the Sun causing interference with radio signals and satellites, would this event also have cause disruptions? Also since it reached the atmosphere, did it also change the weather patterns?
(Any signs of a look-alike of Harrison Ford and a hairy ape escaping in a space shuttle?)
You put the comma in the wrong place. So sayeth Google!
+ per+light+year
http://www.google.com/search?q=astronomical+units
1 light year = 63 239.6717 Astronomical Units
George W. Bush is now working with SETI to negotiate the disarmament of SGR 1806-20's WME's (Weapons of Mass Extinction).
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
I first saw this article yesterday and they had printed that if this magnetar was within 10 000, not 10, lightyears away then Earth would have suffered a mass extinction!
Now, that would be worrying.
Huge Star Quake Rocks Milky Way
Everybody brace yourselves, make for darker ground if you can. We should all know by now that a huge star quake will probably generate a huge lightwave tsunami.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
It was posted 20000 years ago , when the Great Old Ones ruled the earth .
How can you quantify something you cannot measure????
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
... but at that point the universe will have frozen from entropy. So the point is moot.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
At least it's not a repost. :D
--
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The BBC is in Old Europe FB!!!
He was still in his trailer. That explosion was caused by some idiot trying to fly a Rebel battle cruiser for the first time. It left George Lucas with scorch marks on his ass.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Somewhere, Ewoks are celebrating the destruction of the Galactic Empire
Say the density of such stars is uniform in the galaxy. Then the frequency of such explosions within 10 ly from us should be something like
(1/400) * (10/50000)^3
if we assume that the frequency of these things within 50000ly is on the order of 400 years. That is... wait... *tiptiptip* 2*10^-14, i.e. once (or twice) in about 10 trillion years (the universe has an age of a few 10^9 years!).
Well, the galaxy is more like a disc. So let's try the same with an exponent of 2 instead of 3. This gives 1*10^-10, still less then one of these "mass estinction" events in the age of the universe. Not much to fear here...
So... If it occured within 10 light years, it might have caused a mass extinction. But it wasn't that close. It was 5,000 times that far away.
So, in other words, it's about the same as a fly terminating in a frog's fart on the other side of the world.
Meanwhile, there was a drive-by shooting 5 blocks from my house two weeks ago, a hostage situation with a woman armed with a knife two blocks from here this week, and the shooting and stabbing murders and a suicide just on the edge of town two days ago.
Bookmark this in the "looking for relevance" section.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Insightful???!!
What kind of a seizure-ridden ape could have moderated this as Insifhtful?!??
Yep, the quality of BBC reporting seems to be going downhill lately. Probably because of trying to compete with big commercial satellite companies like BSkyB on their own terms; a big mistake for an organisation that has different strengths entirely. Luckily, they're doing good codec work and are (at least planning to) release much of their archives to the public, so their news isn't a big issue for me :)
> One calculation has the giant flare on SGR
> 1806-20 unleashing about 10,000 trillion
> trillion trillion watts.
Bah! Superman could take it from one nanometer away!
Thor would be easily fried, though.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Guess this page needs to be updated eh?
2002 headline "Scientists Measure the Most powerful Magnet Known"
One of the working assumptions in the Red Dwarf books is that Earth is the only planet that developed intelligent life. (later series changed that, but it was explicitly stated in the first two books)
Mabye we're the only intelligence life of the "techno" variety.
Either that, or no technological society survives long after discovering fission.
I'd assume that any Dyson sphere or ringworlds would be putting out quite a bit of electronic noise, and we'd hear about it. Mabye we will, when we start deploying antenna arrays hundreds of miles across in space.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
It will soon be our turn! You know, it's because of the new inter-galactic highway they're building! It will be Earth's turn soon, so get your towels out! ;-)
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
This is a series of emails that discuss the burst. Interesting posts include the following:
There were a series of small bursts observed before the big one, but no one seems to have realized that they were precursors until after the big one arrived. "During 21 December more than 30 SGR-like bursts were detected by Konus-Wind and Helicon-Coronas-F" satellites.
The burst was detected by the Mars Odyssey spacecraft. "A very preliminary analysis indicates that the arrival time at Odyssey is indeed consistent with an arrival direction from SGR1806-20."
There is also discussion of an Earth-orbiting satellite that did not have a direct view of the flare; however, it picked up a faint echo 7.70 seconds after everyone else saw it. "This value corresponds exactly to burst travelling time from the Wind to the Moon and back to the Coronas-F."
Finally, serendipious observations were made by spacecraft whose primary mission is solar observation. "The SGR was 5 degrees from RHESSI's pointing axis which was directed toward the Sun."
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Ok, so this is a neutron star, but it has got to have other stuff in it, right? I mean, a spinning neutron star can't have a magnetic field, right? There are no charged particles moving around... there's no charge, period, right?
Or is it some quantum physics thing that lets neutrons have a magnetic field if they're dense enough..
Anyone care to weigh in? I'm just curious about this...
Just curious, was it visable to the naked eye? Could we have seen it if we had known before hand?
"Ah there we go! Nothing like a good campfire when roughing it in the wilderness."
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
So yeah... what if its really some incredibly huge race of beings, discovering fission(or fusion) on some huge level? or what if its Us? What if the universe is cyclic upon itself? what if our atoms are really stars, or our galaxy is a quark inside of an atom somewhere on earth? Really were just witnessing the effects locally and galactically. Ok, really need to keep the psychedelics away from hte scifi nerds away from the physics people.
how are they going to blame this on "Global Warming" ?
It's amazing that we were affected 50,000 light years away. I wonder how much damage could have occured to humans on the moon; i.e. radiation exposure, physical damage to structures. Ever more amazing was we could have been killed if the Magnatar was closer, "only" 10 light years away.
:P
Wouldn't you love to be flying around in a spaceship and have that Magnatar blast a couple of trillion, trillion, trillion watts of energy at you? This would certainly eliminate most life in the area, as someone mentioned earlier, no worries about aliens from that section of the Galaxy!
Maybe the Goa'uld caused the explosion, trying to kill the members of SG-1?!
Boy, are you in good company.
Did you ever wonder why the Left is so thoroughly marginalized, and why the average person scoffs at ecological alarmism? Look in the mirror.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
I guess I've observed there too many times for such a joke to be funny.
Especially when there's so many better jokes. Like, did you ever come out in the winter to see some guy with his tongue stuck to the sign, going "I thought they were inthructionth!"
You also don't mention what the road to Lick is paved with. Somehow I doubt it's good intentions.
"pointless and misleading...meaningless context" - Putting it into the context of our home planet emphasises the POINT that it has awesome power without changing the MEANING of what Rob Fender was saying (ie: it's not healthy to be anywhere near a magnatar while it is rearranging it's magnetic field). In other words TFA said "If.." and that can only be misleading to a reader with either a "wet blanket" attitude or a total lack of imagination.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
We haven't been able to detect gamma/x-rays for the last 400 years. The 300 years prior to this last century could've been endemic with magnetar quakes and we'd never know it. Might as well claim that it's the largest in human history.
EDIT!!
That happened 50,000 years ago.
hmmm... Maybe it would have been better if it were closer, it would have stopped microsoft...
A short post cannot contain much detail. As far as humans are concerned we see
- the instinct to band together in groups and seek conflict with other groups, and
- the tendency to allow amoral, power-mad individuals to gain leadership of the groups
became counter productive. However, they are built into our genetic makeup and few would be willing to even consider genetic engineering to eliminate these traits.It's hidden behind a government conspiracy, but I know the truth. These so-called "magnetars" are in fact Halo rings. We're just darn lucky that the one we witnessed malfunctioned and did not trigger all the others in the galaxy.
Dumb question but how can a star made up entirely of nutrons (particals without charge) have a strong magnetic field? Something to do with spin?
Maybe this explosion still will cause mass extinction? Maybe we just have to wait another 50,000 years or more likely longer? :) Keep your eyes on the sky!
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
It's amazing that we were affected 50,000 light years away. I wonder how much damage could have occured to humans on the moon; i.e. radiation exposure, physical damage to structures.
Aren't there still a couple of people on the International Space Station? I imaging it's protected from most such radiation by the Van Allen belt, but I'd still worry.
Wouldn't you love to be flying around in a spaceship and have that Magnatar blast a couple of trillion, trillion, trillion watts of energy at you? This would certainly eliminate most life in the area, as someone mentioned earlier, no worries about aliens from that section of the Galaxy!
Robert. L. Forward's stories Dragon's Egg and Starquake discuss life evolvong on a neutron star (okay, it's not hydrocarbon based), as well as [relative to this] very 'minor' quake. I found them a really fun read.
Tag lost or not installed.
Mitochondria contain DNA for one, they are basically full blown prokaryotic organisms, very similar to extant species of aerobic microbes.
Pet peeve: saying "QED" is redundant if you have already stated a conclusion.
20km across. Is this a star, a planet or an asteroid?
Just a stab in the dark, but....I'll bet you spend a lot of time washing your hands.
Oh, come on, folks. This just means someone playing the classic Starquake game on the other side of the galaxy lost and their Sinclair ZX Spectrum took the plot a bit too literally.
"Starquake from Bubble Bus sees the return of Steve Crow, programmer of the much acclaimed Wizard's Lair. Starquake revolves around a small Bio-Logically operated being named Blob, who's been landed with the menial task of saving the universe from a savage destruction.
An unstable and potentially dangerous planet is emerging from a black hole somewhere among the backwaters of the galaxy. The planet is so unstable that it'll blow into a million fragments if its Planetary Core isn't fixed."
http://www.crashonline.org.uk/22/starquke.htm
Gee, the comments I skimmed were *awfully* thin....
Folks, it this happened 10 ly away, you not only would not be reading about this on any media, since it would *all* be toast, but by now most of us would be rotting corpses...assuming that even bacteria were still alive above, say, 30 meters undersea.
mark "medium toast, please"
hey maybe this is why the dinosaurs r extinct...
If you can sample, you can get a good idea of density. But we cannot sample because we have not identified a SINGLE earth-like planet (distance from sun and water) outside our solar system.
Perhaps the proposed space inferometer will change the equation and we will be eventually be able to map our galactic "neighborhood". Even then, you have to take into account the probability for life existing and that life becoming intelligent. And that really cannot be measured without a profoundly more sophisticated brand of technology.
The Drake equation is junk science. It has ZERO practical application to the world. We'll know if aliens exist the day they come to take over the earth
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
This assumes that a habitabal planet will be found FARTHER away from an energy burst.
You'd be far better off digging a deep whole bunker and stocking it with: food, water, and fuel (nuclear if possible). A cryogenic zoo would also be helpful.
Every time the Trek-heads see justification for outrageous space exploration appropriations, I see justification for Tunnel Boring Machines. Dollar for Dollar
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
RUN, COWARD!
:)
Pity you didn't post as an AC
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
how long before bush uses this as an excuse to invade iran? there is certainly as much connection between this magnastar explosion and iran as there was between iraq and 9/11.
You're endangering the galaxy.
"The star, named SGR 1806-20, spins once on its axis every 7.5 seconds, and it is surrounded by a magnetic field more powerful than any other object in the universe." Looks like they buried the headline, the entire universe has been mapped and we now know the upper limit for a magnetic field...
Has anyone double-checked the timing on this to see if the energy that hit us coincided with the earthquake that caused the tsunamis? Mass-extinction, indeed...
Let's face it, without all the sensational conjecture science is "boring".
It needs to be sexed-up for public consumption.
Just once, I'd like to see a space explosion with a "Praxis wave" flying out.
I know this particular blast was invisible to the human eye, but man, if it were visible, it probably would have been pretty sweet to see.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
I don't think parent deserves 5 karma-points for copying the same old joke from today:
9 53 &threshold=1&commentsort=0&tid=160&mode=thread&cid =11720374
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=139
My problem with the superior mind hypothesis is, how did the superior mind originate? Did it just "appear" one day itself?
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
One day after the tsunami hit...eery. A sign, even though it happened 50,000 light years away?
All the more reason for someone to buy my engine theory. http://www.newpath4.com/forsalespacecraftenginecon stantpowertheory.htm . Once all our cars have interstellar capability we can all just drive away. Or, in the case of earthquake activity or a tsunami, raise above the ground floor til the arrow passes. Beats th heck out of one child becoming Clark Kent.
"..within 10 light years of us, it "would possibly have triggered a mass extinction.""
Course if some people had their way, it would only hit us blue states =(
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the sky becomes opaque
Concurrently we'll have eliminated our ozone so we'll need the extra sunblock.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
we're al; doomed
Must be one of those phase-inverted tachyon thingamajiggers.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
(Always a metamod, never a moderator (but once).
Maybe thats because of your freakin unbalanced parenthesis, retard
which would be better understood by all if they knew that 1 au (Astronomical Unit) is the approx distance between the earth and the sun (approximately 150 million km or 93 million miles).
so 10 light yrs is 632,396.717 times the distance between the earth and the sun.
Correction: 6.57x10^5 times (above by Ced_Ex) is 657,000 times.
so that's more than 600,000 au (or more than 600,000 times the dist. between...)
i doubt most ppl have an idea of how far that is. not to make it any clearer, here are some other distances ppl would have little idea of, to compare: