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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.
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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.)
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.
I thought it was just that it was the biggest such explosion recorded by humans within the last 400 years.
just before the explosion:
"Damn you, you bloody baboon!"
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!
I though that the New scientist article on it was a bit more informative.
...what happened to the data on all my magnetic media?
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.
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?
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.
Then you didn't read the New Scientist article which had this gem:
But Christopher Thompson, an astrophysicist at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Physics, says that may not be so. The neutron star in question is rare magnetar, with a magnetic field so strong it could wipe a credit card clean from a distance of 160,000 kilometres. And this magnetar is even rarer yet, one of three "soft gamma repeaters" (SGRs) in the Milky Way.
Ya know, IANAPOAPOA (I Am Not A Physicist Or AstroPhysicist or Astronomer) but I'm willing to bet that if I were 160,000 kilometers from this object, or even our sun, I might be worried about other things than my credit cards getting wiped.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
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*
A still hopefull Star Wars fan.
It depends on your frame of reference. IIRC, from the viewpoint of the gamma ray photons themselves, there was no delay at all between the time of the starquake and reaching earth.
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!
...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...
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
You are slightly off in your estimate. Originally, astronomical events were measured in years. Then Light Years were invented, which had a third less calories than our regular years. So the energy in a Light Year is one third less than a full-bodied year.
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.
I'm from the Bush administration. Put that in terms of burning Libraries of Congress.
Infuriate left and right
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.
Ya know, IANAPOAPOA (I Am Not A Physicist Or AstroPhysicist or Astronomer) but I'm willing to bet that if I were 160,000 kilometers from this object, or even our sun, I might be worried about other things than my credit cards getting wiped.
That's why YANAPOAPOA. I can imagine the interview.
"If you were 160,000 kilometers from this black hole... we'll, you'd be in space, so you'd be dead! So don't go there!"
Magnetic fields are difficult to characterize. What are you going to do, tell people the field is 1000000000000 Tesla? (Yawn, what's a Tesla?) You can't compare magnetic fields to hens eggs or Libraries of Congress. The only thing you can really do is compare them to a field strength that people are intuitively familiar with- like a refrigerator magnet's field, an MRI field, or a field sufficient to wipe magnetic cards. Refrigerator magnets and MRIs come in a variety of field strengths. Plus, smartasses would make comments about refrigerators and magnetic imaging machines in space.
At least it's not a repost. :D
This space intentionally left blank
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Why is it bizarre? When I read it I understood what he meant and why he said it. Light years are big. For anything ten light years distant to have a measurable effect on the Earth is pretty amazing!
The radiation intensity at the surface of the Sun is 63,000,000 watts per square meter. (Your 10 km makes no real difference.) The intensity 10 light years (10^17 m) away from a 10^40 watt source would be approx. 100,000 watts per square meter. So you'd have to be 25 solar radii away from the Sun for its radiation intensity to be equivalent to this magnetar if it were ten light years distant. (For comparison, mercury orbits at about 86 solar radii.) Nitpickers may note that the Sun is mostly radiating UV through IR, and the magnetar's energy is brief and in the gamma ray spectrum, but this is still impressive.
"It's Praxis, sir. It's a klingon moon."
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)
Since no one seemed to catch this :
POPULATION OF UNIVERSE : None.
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in it. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
Courtesy of the late Douglas Adamas
Only 8 away from being prime (569919 - 569927) And mom told me I'm unique!!! Sheesh
...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
How did it affect the astronauts/cosmonauts on the ISS?
Try eMusic. DRM free, legal, MP3 downloads.
Actually, it's more complicated. Yes, the radiation/heating would not be uniform, but the bigger killer would be from the destruction of chemicals like ozone in the upper atmosphere that protects us from the sun's radiation. The details are kind of complicated, and depends on exact distances, fluxes, and spectral energy distrubution. And atmospheric science.
Yeah, excuse me, big science nit-picker tonight.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
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
How many piano tuners are there in Chicago? This is an example Fermi used to use. Yes, maybe you could go out and measure this, using the "job" field in tax returns, the yellow pages, etc., but you can also get an idea of the number by figuring out how many people live in Chicago. How many of those people on average have pianos? How often do they need tuning? How fast can they be tuned? You have a pretty good idea (or he did anyway) of the answers to those individual questions, you can put an estimate on the number without actually making a direct measurement. Some problems in science can be tackled this way, and it's a type of reasoning scientists ought to be able to use well.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
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...
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?
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.
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.Your trying to do an apples to oranges comparison. A Watt is a unit of power. The bomb is usually measured in kilotons or megatons, energy units. But I'll try:
P = E/t
A Watt is a Joule per second.
The energy released by a ton of TNT exploding as a unit of energy is 4.2 x 10^9 Joules. So divide 10^39 (10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts) by 4.2x10^9 and get 2.38095238 x 10^29 tons of TNT per second. That's 2.38 x 10^26 kilotons or 2.38 x 10^23 megatons.
The Hiroshima bomb released about 12.5 kilotons of TNT of energy. That means at one point the magnetar was releasing the energy at the rate of about 1.9 x 10^25 (19,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000)Hiroshima bombs per second.
Of course assuming all my math is correct...
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
My understanding is, at the densities we're talking about, the force of gravity is stronger than the nuclear forces of the atoms -- you get funny things like electron orbits being heavily deformed.
A spinning neutron star that's charged on one side more than another due to gravity pulling electrons around, would induce a magnetic field. Probably a damn strong one too, seeing the forces involved.