'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!"

Comments

Starquake? We need a more... extreme name

[FirienFirien]

"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.

Re:Starquake? We need a more... extreme name

[E Galois]

That's why we have exponential (aka scientific) notation. A trillion is 1 x 10^12, hence a trillion trillion trillion is 1 x 10^36. Of course, 10,000 (1 x 10^4) of those gives 10^40 watts. Your attempted decimal notation representation of the number is off by three orders of magnitude.

"God created the integers, all the rest is the work of man." -- Leopold Kronecker