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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."
"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
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
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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