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'Death Star' Aimed at Earth
An anonymous reader writes "A spectacular, rotating binary star system is a ticking time bomb, ready to throw out a searing beam of high-energy gamma rays that could lead to a major extinction event — and Earth may be right in the line of fire. Australian science magazine Cosmos Magazine reports: 'Though the risk may be remote, there is evidence that gamma ray bursts have swept over the planet at various points in Earth's history with a devastating effect on life. A 2005 study showed that a gamma-ray burst originating within 6,500 light years of Earth could be enough to strip away the ozone layer and cause a mass extinction. Researchers led by Adrian Melott at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, U.S., suggest that such an event may have been responsible for a mass extinction 443 million years ago, in the late Ordovician period, which wiped out 60 per cent of life and cooled the planet.'"
Didn't I see this when it was an episode of Sliders. For once, my watching an obscure science fiction show comes in handy. There was a parallel earth where a pulsar was heading towards earth and was gonna irradiate it and cause a mass extinction event.
Good show, had some hot geeky chicks on it for awhile.
"Write the bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble."
It was nice knowing you.
It's OK! Barack Obama will know what to do! If this thing can just... hold... off... until... next... year.
Maybe if we just planned an unconditional sit-down with the people running that star, they'd like us again.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Right here.
Nah, polarity flips have been happening for a long time; if we lost our atmosphere every time, this planet would LOOK like mars...Anyway, Mars has no atmosphere because it's too small, not because it doesn't have a liquid core with the attendant magnetic field. Losing the magnetic field (which may or may not happen during a flip...Geologic data isn't precise enough to tell) could cause some problems with regards to the solar wind, but complete loss of atmosphere is extremely unlikely.
The average period between pole flips is about 250,000 years, so that will give you a pretty good idea of how often it happens, and how unlikely it is that atmospheric loss follows. For the curious, it's been about 800,000 years since the last flip, so we're due one.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
So let me see if I've got this right...
If a GRB hits us in the next 10 years, the Earth is cooked and we're screwed. Game over.
If a GRB hits us in the next 100 years, the Earth is cooked, and although I'm gone, life on Earth is still screwed. Game over.
If a GRB hits us in the next 1000 years, the Earth is still cooked, I'm long gone as are the vast majority of my descendants, but maybe mankind (assuming we live that long) will have found the means to leave the planet and preserve itself. However, life on Earth is still screwed. Game over.
Ditto for 10k years, 100k, etc. Basically, there's very little we can do to save the Earth, and next to nothing we can do collectively to save ourselves, except for a few lucky individuals. Thus, the long term goal shouldn't be figuring out how to protect the Earth, but rather we should be figuring out how to preserve our legacy. Fighting against Mother Nature has proven time and time again to be futile.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Nah, It's probably better to ignore them. That will make them see things our way better then talking to them :-)
I suppose it's possible you haven't seen the fine documentary, Mars Attacks. Well you should, mister.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Not sure if I'm missing a joke in that your post is modded funny, but I think he was talking about perceived time from the reference of the photon. As they travel the speed of light, time dilation should slow down perceived time infinitely, if my memory of physics serves me.
Subtle point, but interesting, thinking about it.
Whip out your concordance. The Hebrew word for "day" used in Genesis isn't meant to be metaphorical; it's a literal, 24-hour period of time.
If you assume that everything in the Bible is no deeper than a convoluted historical document, you're missing a lot.
The Bible needs this warning sticker.While it is 6,500 light years away, you also have to remember that what we are seeing now is an image from 6,500 years ago. For all we know, it could have already cone supernova 6,499 years ago, and we wouldn't know until next year.
While such Wolf-Rayet doubles, or the LBV in Eta Carniae are definitely pre-supernovae, it is unlikely that they are likely gamma ray burst sources. GRB's have a very strong preference for low metallicity environments, almost certainly because higher metal levels cause them to loose too much mass angular momentum. In this region of the galaxy, the metal levels is too high to have a high unlikelihood of GRB's. Also note that for the GRB to propagate into space, the star must first have blown off its envelope, or the GRB is absorbed in the stellar atmosphere and simply adds to the explosion energy (this is probably quite common).
Google John Titor for the funny.
Actually you're wrong. The word day is used in many contexts in the Bible. The creative days mentioned in the Bible are not literal 24 hour days. In context they refer to periods. There are also scriptures in both Old and New Testaments that say "a thousand years are but as a day in God's eyes" so at bare minimum the creative days would be 6000 years. But what people fail to realise is that there are two creative periods. Genesis 1:1 says "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" but from Genesis 1:2 onwards it talks about creative days on Earth and in the original Hebrew the language indicated it was from the perspective of someone standing on the earth looking up so the creation of the sun, moon, and stars would have seemed to have just happened as a dark cloud was removed thus unveiling the luminaries. The problem with those decrying the Bible is that most of them have never read it so they know stuff all about it. For all the mocking if people read it they'd realise it is a fascinating book with prophecies which have been so accurate that in many cases it's been accused of being written after the fact which is wrong considering that Daniel had the book of Isaiah before the fall of Babylon and Isaiah had written not only that Babylon will fall but who and how (Isaiah 45:1-25) which is the only prophecy to mention a person by name and was written 200 years before the event. Archeology backs up most of the Bible so it's not just a book to be taken on faith.
Oh no. The day-age theorist argument again. If you use that concordance properly, you will note that the usage is not "Back in Caesar's day..." for the Hebrew word 'Yom.' It is used hundreds of times throughout the Bible. The only time it appears to mean more than a single cycle of light and dark (or the period of light only) is when it is applied with a modifier. Even Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (are there others?) states that for the word to mean anything other than a single revolution of the earth (or just the sunlight portion), requires a modifier, such as an enumeration, or something meaning several, or a period of days. So, some day, the gamma rays may wipe out our ozone layer, but is that the Judgement Day, where a third of the world's waters boil up, and a third of the lands are consumed with fire? Holy death star, indeed!
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley