Slashdot Mirror
'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."
Searching Google for phrases from that post didn't turn up ANY hits, so it doesn't seem to be a cut-and-paste troll.
Subject: Cracks me up (31 August 2005)
"Of course they're baffled. They won't let anybody competent explain it to them. These guys never studied plasma fluid dynamics in school, and they figure that now they're too old to learn it."
Subject: Re:Galaxies must be a lot more dynamic than I thou (3 September 2005)
"The reason they insist it has to be something spinning is that they have studied almost no plasma fluid dynamics, so they can't understand something blasting out radio, light, and x-rays that doesn't have a star in the middle of it."
etc etc
He's not a cut and paste troll, but he's posted enough similar things in the past that I thought the same thing as the GP when I read this one.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
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.