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'Starquake' Cracks Star
geekroot's dad writes "Space.com is reporting that a huge 'starquake' releasing as much energy as our sun does in 250,000 years, has cracked a nearby neutron star. The magnetar produced the brightest explosion ever seen by man outside of the milky way. Although it is 50,000 light-years away, the blast was so huge it temporarily blinded some satellites and briefly altered Earth's upper atmosphere!"
When gamma ray detectors were first put on satellites (to detect nuclear bombs being detonated on Earth) huge gamma ray bursts were found coming from around the universe. I don't think we have ever explained what causes them but they are even more energetic than supernova. Would this even be a possible candiate for the cause of such bursts? Or is it not energetic enough? The current popular explaination is these bursts are black holes being born. Can any astronomers here to explain this to a humble programmer?
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Task Mangler
"Had this happened within 10 light-years of us, it would have severely damaged our atmosphere and possibly have triggered a mass extinction," said Bryan Gaensler of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Just yesterday I was looking through a link from a /. article in May; while the solar wind is usually strong enough to push off the interstellar wind (think of it as the sum of solar winds from the rest of the galaxy) at a distance 94 times that of the distance from the Sun to Earth.
What's significantly impressive is that this explosion is strong enough to kick nearly multiple times as hard as the average of what the galaxy usually does to us.
(I'm not quite sure on this figure - the power of the wind from our sun should decrease as r^3, ditto the power from the starquake; if r goes down to 1/94, r^3 is reaching for a million?! This would imply the quake is nearly a million times as strong as the average wind from the galaxy; granted there's likely to be drastic fluid dynamics contortions and things that effectively cut that number down to something more 'sane' (depending on how sane you think it is to try to calculate stellar force magnitudes...), but you still have a figure significantly bigger than the entire galaxy!)
And then you get to the quote line from the article "We have observed an object only 20 kilometers across [12 miles], on the other side of our galaxy, releasing more energy in a tenth of a second than the Sun emits in 100,000 years."
combine that with the distance from us (50000 light years = 6 trillion miles = 10 trillion km) and the bit where it says it rotates on its axis every 7.5 seconds and has the strongest magnetic field in the known universe... wow.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
Doin the neutron-starquake-crack dance!
10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 watts of power.
Great Scott!!
From TFA:
The magnetic field around one [magnetar] is about 1,000 trillion gauss, strong enough to strip information from a credit card at a distance halfway to the Moon
I admit that 1,000 trillion gauss is not an easy number to grasp but why would someone want to present it like this? It's not as if everybody knows the strength of a magnetic field required to wipe a credit card at a distance of 1 meter....
I agree that in general it's not that simple: gravity pulls the wind back, so that it falls off faster than that, but with a "quake" like this, gravity's going to have a hard job.
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Well, that's not true. There's a well-understood process in plasma fluid dynamics where what is called a "double layer" explodes. (Each solar flare is such an event.) There's really no upper limit on how much energy such an explosion might release; it depends on the magnitude of the current that is interrupted. Similarly, charged particles can be accelerated to just about any degree in a big enough electric field gradient. However, astronomers, as a rule, have never heard of double layers, and they think of interstellar space as infinitely conductive. (I'm not joking!) They don't read plasma physics journals, despite that everything they can see is plasma, and most of what they can't. (They prefer to call it all "hot gas" and to imagine it just blows around like especially thin air.) They are astonished and mystified at each new observation of familiar plasma phenomena.
Thus, all that lovely filamentary stuff in the Crab Nebula, nicely separated by elemental composition and glowing in x-ray bands, is not fantastically intricate plasma fluid (and current) flows, but just "hot gas" clouds pushed around by "winds" and "shock waves". High-energy events can't happen without some sort of heavy lump to happen on or near, hence the burgeoning population of implausibly massive black holes and and impossibly dizzy neutron stars. A great lot of current accelerated in a straight line is a "jet" or (like the one connecting to our own sun's south pole, identically as to the axes of galaxies, of pulsars, and lately just about everything) a "plume".
Sincerely
M' uldh pGar
Chief of PR Intergalactic Council
Spacehips laden with supplies for refugees on the launchpads.
You know, the ability to simply repeat the theories of real astronomers in a disdainful tone isn't generally considered convincing evidence for an alternative crackpot theory. Go play with your astronomer-wannabe electrician friends. Come back when you can explain where your sun-powering electric conduits can be found and measured, k?
1. Cause a distant star to crack, releasing profane amount of energy. 2. Silly post on a Slashdot forum. 3. ??? 4. Profit!!!
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"Had this happened within 10 light-years of us, it would have severely damaged our atmosphere and possibly have triggered a mass extinction," said Bryan Gaensler of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA)."
Possible explaination for the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, and others?
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Interestingly enough, a physicist by the name of Robert Forward (did alot of work with space tethers) published a book called Dragons Egg about life on a neutron star. He actually said it was really a book on neutron star physics described as a science fiction book. Anyways the sequel to it was called Starquake where exactly this happened. Both books were interesting reads, and although this is kind of off topic, it just reminded me of them.
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A million is 1000^2 or 10^6, .... ....
..
a billion is 1000^3 or 10^9,
a trillion is 1000^4 or 10^12,
a quadrillion is 1000^5 or 10^15
a quintillion is 1000^6 or 10^18
a sextillion is 1000^7 or 10^21
a septillion is 1000^8 or 10^24
a octillion is 1000^9 or 10^27
a nonillion is 1000^11 or 10^30
a decillion is 1000^12 or 10^33
a undecillion is 1000^13 or 10^36
a duodecillion is 1000^14 or 10^39
a tredecillion is 1000^15 or 10^40
a quattuordecillion is 1000^16 or 10^42
a quindecillion is 1000^17 or 10^45
a sexdecillion is 1000^18 or 10^48
a septendecillion is 1000^19 or 10^51
a octodecillion is 1000^20 or 10^54
a novemdecillion is 1000^21 or 10^57
a vigintillion is 1000^22 or 10^60
a zillion is 10^playground
a googol is 10^100
a googolplex is 10^googol (if you wrote this down in its expanded form, the paper would not fit into the volume of the solar system)
So the wattage output is just a piddly 1.0 tredecillion watts - or, you you adopt Jim Blower's Extended System of Units, that would be 10 tredawatts
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A million is 1000^2 or 10^6, .... ....
..
a billion is 1000^3 or 10^9,
a trillion is 1000^4 or 10^12,
a quadrillion is 1000^5 or 10^15
a quintillion is 1000^6 or 10^18
a sextillion is 1000^7 or 10^21
a septillion is 1000^8 or 10^24
a octillion is 1000^9 or 10^27
a nonillion is 1000^11 or 10^30
a decillion is 1000^12 or 10^33
a undecillion is 1000^13 or 10^36
a duodecillion is 1000^14 or 10^39
a tredecillion is 1000^15 or 10^40
a quattuordecillion is 1000^16 or 10^42
a quindecillion is 1000^17 or 10^45
a sexdecillion is 1000^18 or 10^48
a septendecillion is 1000^19 or 10^51
a octodecillion is 1000^20 or 10^54
a novemdecillion is 1000^21 or 10^57
a vigintillion is 1000^22 or 10^60
a zillion is 10^playground
a googol is 10^100
a googolplex is 10^googol (if you wrote this down in its expanded form, the paper would not fit into the volume of the solar system)
So the wattage output of the SGR 1806-20 flare is just a piddly 1.0 tredecillion watts - or, you you adopt Jim Blower's Extended System of Units, that would be 10 tredawatts
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According to the Hubble site: "Precise observations made with the Hubble telescope confirm that the interstellar interloper is the closest neutron star ever seen. The object also doesn't have a companion star that would affect its appearance. Now located 200 light-years away in the southern constellation Corona Australis, it will swing by Earth at a safe distance of 170". The field strength of EM disturbances and the denisty of radiated particles will fall off as the square of the distances. So a neutron star quake in this nearest neighbor would be (50000^2)/(170^2) times stronger than the effects reported in TFA. Thats a 86505 fold increase in power.
yeah, you gonna need to put on some pretty strong SPF suntan lotion for that bad boy.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
From TFA:Ok, so a magnetar is a type of neutron star with an extremely strong magnetic field. Also from TFA:So, is it a neutron stat or not? I was under the impression that neutron stars were called that because the immense gravitational field squished all the protons and electrons together into neutrons, forming an all-neutron star. It would seem that Wikipedia's definition supports the idea of a non-homogeneous neutron composition. When did it change from being all-neutrons to having a yummy mostly-neutrony center?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
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How far outside of the milky way does man now travel?
The magnetarin question is actually in our galaxy, albeit on the other side of it... so it's hard to imagine how it was the "brightest explosion ever detected outside of the Milky Way."
So why is this news today, Sept. 2005?
The physics used to keep a human-crewed spaceship in close orbit around a neutron star without tidal forces ripping the crew apart are interesting. The appendicies to "Dragon's Egg" have interesting "hard" (well, not really: high school physics should be enough to understand them) derivations.
You could've hired me.
Replying to trolls is usually a mistake, but fine:
It's not hard to measure astronomical electrical currents: electrical current is directly proportional to magnetic field strength, which is routinely measured using the Zeeman effect. Yes, any place you find a magnetic field, electric charges are in motion. No, the interior of a rotating star is not the only place where charged particles can move.It's not clear that interstellar currents produce much of the sun's light. (It would account for events at the sun surface that core fusion cannot, but the evidence is incomplete.) What is perfectly clear is that they power x-ray emissions of similar magnitudes distributed across light-years-wide nebulae. Any description of a celestial phenomenon where they are known to occur (e.g. where there is a visible "jet", or x-rays over an extended region) that neglects them, and also fails to explain why their effects must be negligible, is trivially wrong. Any model of galactic or cosmic evolution that fails to reproduce them is, likewise, trivially wrong.
People who take dark matter and dark energy seriously obviously aren't very interested in "convincing evidence", because they have exactly none at all. (Not only that, there's no place to put it: galactic lensing analyses show galaxies are no more massive than the stars and dust in 'em.) The only properties either has is whatever mass or repulsion is needed to prop up a falsified cosmogological theory -- and a different amount for each theory.
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Luckily, it's NOT a magnetar. One of those 200 ly away would be serious cause for concern.
l which does a good job of explaining the physics in non-technical terms.
There's a good site at http://solomon.as.utexas.edu/~duncan/magnetar.htm
It seems that neutron stars are born on a cusp. If they're spinning fast enough, a self-sustaining dynamo process, similar to that in the Earth's core starts up in the first few milliseconds of it's life. Within a few seconds, energy from the initial immense heat of the star is siphoned off to increase the (already huge) magnetic field by hundreds or thousands of times, and this field is then locked in place as the star cools.
I don't think even the number of atoms in the universe equals a googolplex. Last time I did some wildly inaccurate napkin calculations, I was still about ten orders of magnitude short.
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Here's a question I've sometimes considered: Does any measurement of a natural phenomenon equal or exceed a googolplex? That all depends on your perspective, or unit of measurement. If you're measuring by hundredths of trillions of the width of an electron, then the scale of the universe goes from really really big to downright gigantic.
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Taking a generous estimate of the radius of the solar system to be 100AU (1 AU is the distance from the earth to the sun), using a simple spherical model for the shape of the solar system, and if we have a Japanese rice writer (called Takahiro), who can write zeros at 0.01mm on very thin paper 0.01mm thick, we can work out just how many zeros Takahiro can fit into the universe. (To be clear, we are stating that Takahiro can write a zero on a piece of paper 0.01mm x 0.01mm x 0.01mm, so along a strip of paper 1 mm long, he can write 100 zeros)
0 ,000,000,000,000,000,000 zeros; just over 14 octodecillion zeros.
0 ,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 zeros; - a paltry 14,023 vigintillion zeros.
1 AU = 149597870.691 kilometers
100 AU = 14959787069.1 Km
= 14,959,787,069,100 m
= 1,495,978,706,910,000 cm
= 14,959,787,069,100,000 mm
= 1,495,978,706,910,000,000 zeros is how many zeros Takahiro can write along 100 AU, the radius of the solar system.
So, we can get the volume of a sphere using V = (4/3)(PI)(r^3), so we can measure the volume of the solar system in Takahiro zeros as about 14,023,772,097,665,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,00
So, our heroic Takahiro didn't get close to writing out the googolplex.
Let's now imagine that he managed to get "Epic zero-writing +100 power up elite uberskillz", and could write a hundred thousand zeros along a strip of paper 1mm and 0.00001mm thick. Hey, he can still only fit in
14,023,772,097,665,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,00
Just to let you know just how small Takahiro's handwriting needs to be to fit the googolplex into the solar system (and why it is a safe bet), he needs to fit 89.5 quadrillion zeros along a millimeter of paper that is 89.5 quadrillionth of a millimeter thick.
Essentially, he needs to write a zero at every 112 femtometers. - significantly smaller than the distance between the carbon atoms in diamond, which are spaced at 142000 femtometers center to center.
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Well see my note on Takahiro for the solar system equation - certainly one has to go very small indeed ... :-)
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