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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!"
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?
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.
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.
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.
It didn't happen 50005 years ago, it happened 5 years ago and 50000 light years away. There is no objective time.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Someone here has to submit the story to the slashdot servers. Assuming it's accepted immediately, as the standard of editing suggests, someone who sent a page request for the frontpage just after the submission would see the story when the frontpage got back to him. His request for the story then has to be propagated to the server, which has to reply. This means that the server is not more than 1.25 light years away from Earth. Clearly, you must be new here.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
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.
That's just 1 day after the tsunami. Could there be a connection?!
5 years ago is "Earth receive time".
50005 years ago is when it happened in Earth's frame of reference.
There is no objective time, but that's not a reason to go on a crusade and burn every calendar and clock we have. We're on Earth, so we use Earth's frame of reference.
Oddly enough that explains all the dupes one sees on slashdot quite well. They are being uploaded from various star systems, and teh editors don't see the final page until after they have already clicked on submit.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
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
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
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.
Phil says further down in the comments that the ISS was behind the earth when the main pulse hit.
If it had been in front, the astronauts would have gotten the equivalent of a dental X-ray.
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.
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.
Meme regurgitation is really only ever funny if you use them correctly.