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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?
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
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".
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?
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.
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.