Slashdot Mirror
Fifth Anniversary of a Cosmic Onslaught
The Bad Astronomer writes "Five years ago today (December 27, 2004), a vast wave of high-energy gamma and X-rays washed over the Earth, blinding satellites and partially ionizing the Earth's atmosphere. The culprit was a superflare from the magnetar SGR 1806-20, located 50,000 light years away. The energy released was mind-numbing: in one-fifth of a second, this supercharged magnetic neutron star blasted out as much energy as the Sun does in 250,000 years!"
I guess slashdot's servers must by 5 light years away huh?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The energy released was mind-numbing: in one-fifth of a second, this supercharged magnetic neutron star blasted out as much energy as the Sun does in 250,000 years!"
There's no way for me to get my head around these numbers to "truly" feel it. What methods can you use to visualize such extreme numbers?
Gamma rays travel at the speed of light, so there is no possible warning should something like this happen closer to us. When you see it, it's already there. It could all be over any minu
Neutrinos also travel at the speed of light. Don't believe me? Well, why is it so hard to prove they don't?
Without mind-altering substances? Well, go to a very dark, open place at night and look at the sky for a little while. Then imagine all those little stars as bright as the sun. Then imagine all that compressed to one point. That should sort of help.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
After investigating further, the scientists found that the the star likely ate at Chipotle earlier in the day.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
There is a leak in your roof, and it is dripping water into a bucket: drip drip, drip drip. That's the sun. Then someone dumps the bucket of water over your head all at once, only the bucket is the size of an Olympic swimming pool. That's your neutron star.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Neutrino oscillation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_oscillation proves that they DON'T travel at the speed of light.
I don't know about the lights, but don't get me angry. You won't like me when I am angry!
Fight Spammers!
So what if something big happened somewhere in universe 50005 years ago? Things happen, move on!
Assuming that we are working with the standard burning library of congress as the measuring unit, we can define the energy release in those terms:
1 Burning Library of Conress (BLOC)
4kcal/g
20TB data
1MB/novel
1 novel = 200g
4,000 metric tons
16 billion kcal
Solar output ~~ 10^22 kcal/second
250,000 years = 8*10^12 seconds
energy of event: 8*10^35 kcal
energy of event/BLOC ~~ 5*10^25 burning libraries of congress
1 billion BLOC/second for 1.7 billion years
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
8*10^34 not 8*10^35 however, the calculation is still largely correct as 10^35 was a typing error.
The sun's a sticky note, the neutron star's an LOC.
50,000 light years away and did all that? Imagine if it was say only 500 ly. We are kind of lucky that we don't have any flaky stars nearby....or do we?.....(cue scary music).
Or sometimes far off stars merely have to "point" our way. Magnetism and other forces can focus radiation like a lens, and it may all point to a narrow spot in the sky. If your planet happens to be in the path of the beam, woes be. God doesn't play dice with the universe, he plays Russian Roulette. Time to buy some galactic insurance.
Table-ized A.I.
It's okay. Quantum probability time-paths have resulted in a back-up of us. However, your next girlfriend will be 70% uglier than otherwise would have been. That's the price one pays for using quantum backup devices.
Table-ized A.I.
If they are slower than the gamma and xrays, they won't be of much use in forecasting anyhow.
Table-ized A.I.
Neutrinos are slightly slower than gamma and xrays in vacuum, but they're way faster when traversing an exploding star or such so they kinda get a headstart.
I prefer the SI unit of VW Beetle.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
The energy released was mind-numbing: in one-fifth of a second, this supercharged magnetic neutron star blasted out as much energy as the Sun does in 250,000 years!"
There's no way for me to get my head around these numbers to "truly" feel it. What methods can you use to visualize such extreme numbers?
A fifth of a second is about the time it takes to blink. It's about 12 frames of a 720P HD video signal.
So that way I got a 771 error
Science isn't about proving something doesn't happen, it's about proving something empirically happens.
So there's no scientific value in saying, for example, that 0% of lab rats survive being placed in 0 degree salt water for 2+ hours then? How about for 90 minutes? What about 45 minutes? When exactly DO they survive?
Of course science can prove negatives. It doesn't matter if you're demonstrating how something works, or CLEARLY demonstrating how it DOESN'T work (which usually leads to a rethink and experimental redesign to find an alternative hypothesis). Science is concerned with REPRODUCIBLE RESULTS. A hypothesis that is thrown out still has value - it prevents someone else from going down that path. If you think in absolutes, you are more likely than not to be suffering from distortions and perhaps "religion".
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Nope, not enough. Assuming the drop of water is 0.1 cm^3, your "bucket" would need to be the size of *two thousand* Olympic swimming pools to get approximately the same ratio.
Damn, now I got to go dig thru my DVD collection and watch it again.
Mmmmm...Milla.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
A fifth of a second is about the time it takes to blink. It's about 12 frames of a 720P HD video signal.
Or, a fifth of a second is also the built-in physiological delay between the beating of your heart's atria and it's ventricles. 0.2 seconds is the norm. lub dub, lub dub, lub dub.......
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I'm sorry, I used the wrong set of dimensions off the web site I used to get the dimensions of an Olympic-size swimming pools. The correct answer should be two hundred and fifty Olympic swimming pools.
This is why we need powers of 6 for moderation. Sometimes 5 is simply insufficient.
The galactic team must have won big for the coach to get the Gatorade Bucket like that.
Table-ized A.I.
Just wait a few months, the LHC will trigger one for your viewing pleasure.
Table-ized A.I.
What are you talking about? You assume the size of a drop of water but neglected to even mention the rate at which it accumulates. Wikipedia places the Olympic-size swimming pool at 2,500,000 L. To fill that in 25 years (25 * 365 * 86400 = 788,400,000 seconds) is about 3.17 mL/sec. That doesn't seem too far off from the roof-leak I had about 2 weeks ago (through some of the flashing around the bathroom's vent) considering the gross approximations that we're working with here. If your roof-leak is 2000 times worse than sure, two thousand Olympic swimming pools. I hope you get it fixed sometimes in the next 25 years, though; it would be a pity to finally pay off that mortgage and then have the house collapse the next moment.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
They called into work sick.
Table-ized A.I.
Yes, every large earthquake must be connected to a cosmic event? I think not.
That's just 1 day after the tsunami. Could there be a connection?!
The energy released was mind-numbing: in one-fifth of a second, this supercharged magnetic neutron star blasted out as much energy as the Sun does in 250,000 years!"
There's no way for me to get my head around these numbers to "truly" feel it. What methods can you use to visualize such extreme numbers?
"I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way! "
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
That's the energy released from the combustion of seven bazillion Libraries of Congress.
What you're thinking about is still proving that something DOES happen - demise of rats in your example. Or failure of that particular experiment.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Don't follow the link until you've got a good mental image, k?
Go here and turn off absolutely every light, every appliance, everything.
Now, turn on just one nice bright lightbulb.
That's the sun.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Okay, so that's a minus for drugs.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Neutrino oscillation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_oscillation proves that they DON'T travel at the speed of light.
The quote from the first line of the page you linked reads thusly: Neutrino oscillation is of theoretical and experimental interest since observation of the phenomenon implies that the neutrino has a non-zero mass, which is not part of the original Standard Model of particle physics.
It doesn't sound like anything is proven, or else it would be "case closed". The jury is still out on this one (although contrary to my posts, I believe the neutrino to be massive--just as you believe.)
Technically the error occured at the step that calculates the solar output. The Sun puts out 1400W/m^2 electromagnetic radiation at Earth's orbital distance of ~150 million km. The total output is equal to the surface area of the orbit (4*pi*r^2) which is 4*(3.14)*(1.5*10^11)^2 = 4*10^26 W for which 1 kcal/sec = 4180 W which means ~10^23 kcal/sec energy is released. Doin the math leads to 10^35 being the correct answer leaving the remainder of the math quite correct.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Seriously this sounds like the event that made the Fantastic Four, maybe some astronauts or cosmonauts need to be checked.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
The blast lasted 200ms. During that time, half the Earth was facing away, shielded by not just atmosphere, but the rock of the solid Earth. Which direction relative to the Earth (latitude, longitude) did the blast come in from, and hit directly (except for atmosphere, and a bit of satellite shadow)?
On a related subject, which direction does our Solar System "point" at? When it's the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, what angle on our solar orbit are we making with a line directly to the galactic core? What angle that day with the a tangent to our galactic orbit? Where are we looking at, anyway?
--
make install -not war
You're misunderstanding what a negative argument is.
Go try to test this hypothesis: "No rat can survive 2+ hours in 0degree salt water, ever."
You can test it all you like, with a million rats if you so desire. But you can never confirm it, even if you test a million of them. There might be some rat genotype out there capable of surviving, and you can't prove there isn't. That's trying to prove a negative.
In your example, you have proven that some average survival time of your rats is 2.5hrs. That's a positive.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Actually, due to the number of cosmic events, this is in fact true and inevitable. Every large earthquake is tightly correlated with a nice selection of cosmic events.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Errrr... the line you quote from the page does nothing to cast doubt on the accepted mass-having, non-light speed-traveling nature of the neutrino. I remember reading that they discovered neutrinos had mass years ago, and I haven't heard from any scientific publication claiming otherwise since.
In the sense that nothing can be proven in science, yes, the case is not closed. But in the usual usage of the phrase the case is closed, nailed shut and buried six feet under the ground.
Happy people make bad consumers.
Yes, although given the predisposition for earthquakes to cause magnetar flares, this is just too much to match up as coincidence.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
OK, to put it in Slashdot standard units, look at this picture:
http://arweb.sdsu.edu/es/virtualtour/childrens_ctr.html
Now imagine this one joining the game:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22158290@N04/2139767266/
That's the kind of scale we're talking about.
(Note, the photos were chosen for amusement, not accuracy. They are intended to show "big" and "small", not specific ratios.)
I hate it when I make a joke and I get modded "+5 insightful". Mod the stupid comments "funny", not "insightful", pleas
It doesn't sound like anything is proven, or else it would be "case closed".
Wikipedia is not authoritative. Neutrinos have been known to have mass for over five years now, and the physics community is now focused on refining the parameters that characterize massive neutrinos.
Although we know that neutrinos have mass, we don't know what the mass is because our current experiments are only sensitive to the square of the mass difference between different types of neutrino. However, we do know that all types of neutrino have mass, although the most plausible values are less than a millionth of the electron mass, making it tricky to detect by time-of-flight measurements because any detectable neutrino is going to be ultra-relativistic, travelling so close to the speed of light as to be indistinguishable from a massless particle under almost all circumstances, which is why it was so difficult to prove they do have mass.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
If neutrinos traveled at the speed of light, they wouldn't have time (literally) to oscillate.
This is independent of rest mass.
However, if they travel at less than c, they have to have rest mass or their energy and momentum would be zero.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
50,000 light years away and did all that? Imagine if it was say only 500 ly. We are kind of lucky that we don't have any flaky stars nearby....or do we?.....(cue scary music).
Eta Carinae is expected to go supernova real soon (astronomical time scale - could be tomorrow, could be 10^6 years from now). It's less than 8000 ly away which is not very close, but much closer than 50000ly. And when it goes pop, Eta Carinae will be a pretty big one. Its rotation axis does not point towards us, so effects would be mostly limited to satellites and anything in the upper atmosphere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eta_Carinae
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I guess it depends which medical school you studied at, and which text books you read.
However Google returns 65,300 hits for lub dup, and 11,200,000 hits for lub dub. So if google is any indication, I am "right" and you are "wrong"...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You're misunderstanding what a negative argument is.
Go try to test this hypothesis: "No rat can survive 2+ hours in 0degree salt water, ever."
You can test it all you like, with a million rats if you so desire. But you can never confirm it, even if you test a million of them. There might be some rat genotype out there capable of surviving, and you can't prove there isn't. That's trying to prove a negative.
Sure you can prove that kind of negative buy turning it into positive. You can perhaps (if it is true, though in this particular case I very much doubt it) prove that some essential moleculer or cellular structure in rats body will not survive that environment for that long, ever. Just increasing the temperature of the environment by a few hundred degrees would probably allow proving that no rat will survive there 2+ hours, ever, for any sensible definition of "rat", "survive" and "ever".
"What methods can you use to visualize such extreme numbers?"
According to the article you need a monitor a thousand feet tall.
Why? Light can change frequency during its flight, and that travels at c. Neutrinos take a certain amount of time to travel from point A to point B in our perspective.
Of course, drops come in lots of different sizes, but I'm guessing that one was on the large side. At some point the drop will get too large for surface tension to properly hold it together and it breaks up -- (assuming it's falling in gravity, anyways.)
Thanks for your post. I like it a lot. I always trusted massive neutrinos to be true, but I never knew about the bounds on their masses the way you put it. Great post!
Since the tsunami was west of the dateline, and TFA didn't mention the time or coordinate system used, I thought it might have been possible...
But according to wikipedia, the earthquake that caused the tsunami occurred at 2004-12-26 00:58 UTC. According to this paper, the "cosmic onslaught" hit us at 2004-12-27 21:30 UTC.
So, no. It isn't possible for the neutron star event to have caused the tsunami as it was outside of the tsunami event's light cone.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Imagine what you could do with a Beowulf Cluster of them there Magnetars
tl;dr.
I'll wait for the good remake of the movie, and just read the summary here on Slashdot.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
The difference between that and say a bullet? Not too much, except for the gravitational influence it would have. Kinda something along the style of Tunguska incident. The hole would be trivial at that point.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Sorry but you are conflating proof with observation and extrapolation. Your prediction that no rat can survive is based on very strong evidence but it's not proof. Nature does not have to obey logic, you cannot under any circumstances predict the future with 100% certainty. Proof is found in axiomatic systems such as maths, it is not found in science.
Of course imperfect does not mean useless.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"However, your next girlfriend will be 70% uglier than otherwise would have been. That's the price one pays for using quantum backup devices."
Yes, but it's raining dohnuts.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Light cannot change frequency during its flight; in order to do so, it must be absorbed and re-emitted.
This seems dangerously close to issues with Wittgenstein's thoughts on categorization, or more explicitly: let's say you determine that the liver cannot for some reason survive more than 60 minutes of being less than 35 degrees celsius, but then what next? ...
- what if you transplant the liver with an artificial liver? Does the rat still contain the essential characteristics of 'rattiness'?
- what if the rat is spectactularly fat, and so it takes longer for the liver to go below that temperature? Does that mean the rat is no longer a rat?
- or long fur?
- etc
A generally accepted way to 'prove' negative hypotheses is to prove them at a specific statistical certainty level, eg 99% or 99.9%. This has obvious flaws, but it's generally useful, as long as one keeps in mind its limitations, eg the file drawer problem, publication bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_statistics
Sounds like you need it in Smoots!
Who is John Cabal?
This page has an MPEG of the aftermath of this event.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Sorry but you are conflating proof with observation and extrapolation. Your prediction that no rat can survive is based on very strong evidence but it's not proof. Nature does not have to obey logic, you cannot under any circumstances predict the future with 100% certainty. Proof is found in axiomatic systems such as maths, it is not found in science.
But that applies to positive "proofs" as well, and I commented on the claim that you can never prove a negative.
Of course the real glitch is thinking in the terms of positive/negative. It's better to ask for example "What are the parameters of an environment where no rat will survive for 2 hours, never ever". Then you can start with "temperature and pressure where entire mass of the planet containing the rat will reach ionization temperature in 2 hours due to laws of thermodynamics" and go down from that.
It's Bouquet!
If you were to test it on every rat in existence, leading to the total exctinction of the rat species, then blow up the earth, and kill every other sentient being in the universe, while ascending to godhood and changing the laws of physics so that salt water can no longer exist, then I think that would pretty much prove it. Your problem is that you're just lazy.
The purpose of the economy is to produce what is needed not to guarantee the buggy whip manufacturer a job.
No, the purpose of the economy is to keep the people civilized through the production of goods, rather than the destruction of rivals. Necessity is often an illusion.
A buggy whip would be more useful than say, all magazines currently being printed, because I could at least beat horses and people with it.
This is my sig.
How many libraries of congress is that ?
What a depressingly stupid machine.
> You actually CAN prove negative statements . it is called INDUCTION. look it up ,
For mathematics, yes. The example in the post you are replying to is biology. Nice try however.
> You can also "prove" negative statements to high degrees of confidence using this other thing called STATISTICS . look it up ,
"prove" != prove. The GP didn't say you couldn't get a high confidence that you are correct, he only said you cannot PROVE it. The type of proofs that can be taken as indisputable absolute truths are very rare outside of pure mathematics.
mov ax, 4c00h
int 21h
Meme regurgitation is really only ever funny if you use them correctly.
That 250,000 times one year of solar output number wasn't very meaningful, since the star released all the energy in 1/5 of a second.
So, we should look at the actual ratio. There are 31,557,600 seconds in an average year (365.25 days). Five times that (to account for 1/5 seconds) is 157,788,000. That number, times 250,000 is 39,447,000,000,000.
So, for that 1/5 of a second, the neutron star put out about 39.5 trillion times as much energy as the Sun. Since the Sun puts out about the energy of 100 billion H-bombs per second, well that's a LOT of energy. Some might call this a "superflare", I'd call it one heck of a big explosion! Note that the energy intensity was much higher than for a supernova!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
"1.000051(29) times the speed of light".
Neutrinos? (from the wikipedia page).
I don't think it's totally ridiculous to assume that different particles with different magnetic moments were affected differently by the immense magnetic field of a magnetar. But if the Gamma, Xray, and radio waves arrive within seconds of each other, it's hard to imagine another particle could've made the trip 1.5 days quicker. But maybe that's just my lack of imagination and poor math skills.
Seriously, Don't take anything I say seriously.
do proofs using induction exist in anything but math? I've never seen one for anything else
In your example, you have proven that some average survival time of your rats is 2.5hrs. That's a positive.
I'm curious why that would be considered proven.
You state that I can't prove that all rats die if put in 0-degree water for 4 hours, because even if I test 1,000,000 of them, rat # 1,000,001 might survive for 20 hours. However, you state above that I could say that the average survival time is 2.5 hours. How is that? What if rat #1,000,001 though 2,000,000 all survive for 20 hours? That would radically change the average time.
Seems like you can't prove a negative or any summary statistic.
Advice: on VPS providers
Maybe the particles that causes the tsunami also started 1.5 days earlier.
Wait... in this new time line, I actually HAVE a girlfriend?!? I hope my wife doesn't find out about her!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.