'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

gamma ray bursts

[sfcat]

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?

Re:gamma ray bursts

[stevelinton]

You are thinking of Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs). They are actually much MORE violent events than this one, but also MUCH further away.
They are still being studied, and their causes are still somewhat ambiguous, but black holes are almost certainly involved. One theory, if I recall correctly is big bright short-lived stars in the early universse reaching the end of their life. The core of the star then collapses very suddenly, forming a black hole (in a regular supernova you get a neutron star) and the outer part of the star follows it in, and get heated and churned by the implosion, and then explodes out. Another theory is that a GRB represents the last moments a a neutron star falling into a black hole, or two neutron stars colliding to form a black hole.

These magnetar related events are much less energetic, but loads nearer.

Re:gamma ray bursts

[Directrix1]

Man slashdot must be about a lightyear away from this server as this article is from February.

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:Cracks me up

[blincoln]

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.