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X-Ray Burst Temporarily Blinds NASA Satellite
RedEaredSlider writes with news that a recently-detected gamma-ray burst, originating roughly five billion light-years away, was powerful enough to temporarily blind NASA's Swift satellite. Phil Plait has an interesting writeup on the event. Quoting:
"Swift, normally easily able to handle the X-ray load from these explosions, was overwhelmed, and actually shut down temporarily when software detected that the cameras onboard might get damaged by the flood of light. That’s never happened before. The burst was so bright in X-rays it put other GRBs to shame: slamming Swift with 143,000 X-ray photons per second, it was 5 times brighter than the previous record holder, and nearly 200 times as bright as a typical GRB! Weirdly, it didn’t look out of the ordinary in visible light."
In a tragedy reported today, Superman was looking at the sky during the GRB event and was blinded due to his X-ray vision. Reports say that he is now training with a seeing-eye falcon.
Help me fix my brother's injured butt!
...for this LHC to achieve such respectable levels of efficiency.
One that hath name thou can not otter
I think there has been at least a dozen horror and apocalyptic films that have started with this exact event.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
She Blinded Me With Science. Did you know Thomas Dolby is touring again, btw?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Only fired off one Halo
Wherever You Go, There You Are
"Ha, ha, made you blink!"
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Betelgeuse! Betelgeuse! Betelgeuse!
intergalactic spaceport screening systems
Yeah, it is quite weird that X-Rays weren't visible in "visible light"... seeing how the visible light spectrum doesn't even remotely include x-ray...
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
nm
(143,000, photons /second) x (h, Planck's constant in j-s) x (c, speed of light (in m/s)) / (avg wavelength of x-ray) = (6.63E-32)(3E8)(143,000)/(5E-9) = ~5.68E-10 J/S
Amirite?
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Some....where.....out there....at a glowing terminal in a galaxy far far away....
Pinging eth0.sol.andromeda.alphaquadrant.gxy [10.197.19.1] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 10.197.19.1: bytes=32 time1ms TTL=127
Request timed out
Reply from 10.197.19.1: bytes=32 time1ms TTL=127
Reply from 10.197.19.1: bytes=32 time1ms TTL=127
Ping statistics for 10.197.19.1:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 3, Lost = 1 (25% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Why are aliens X-raying our satellites? I think Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones should be alerted.
while (true != false) process_more_stupid_code();
..which planet?
We can probably blame the MIB (or those they police) for this latest development...
coding is life
... Doctor Bruce Banner stubbed his toe on a table leg, then declared to the journalists "HULK SMASH!" before smashing his way out through the brick wall.
Now what would be interesting is that somebody plug those number into a calculator, and assuming a perfect spherical repartition of the X ray photon, calculate the energy / intensity of the total photon emitted at the moment of the event, in 1 AU radius...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
why my big toe was hurting yesterday!
You try to make the bird so light, and this is the price you will pay down the road.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Blinded by the light
revved up like a deuce
another runner in the night
Blinded by the light
revved up like a deuce
another runner in the night
Blinded by the light
revved up like a deuce
another runner in the night
Madman drummers bummers
Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat
In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat
With a boulder on my shoulder feelin kinda older
I tripped the merry-go-round
With this very unpleasin sneezin and wheezin
the calliope crashed to the ground
The calliope crashed to the ground
But she was
Blinded by the light
revved up like a deuce
runner in the night
Some silicone sister with a manager mister told me I go what it takes
She said "Ill turn you on sonny to something strong
play the song with the funky break"
And go-cart Mozart was checkin out the weather chart to see if it was safe outside
And little Early-Pearly came by in his curly-wurly and asked me if I needed a ride
Asked me if I needed a ride
But she was
Blinded by the light
revved up like a deuce
another runner in the night
Blinded by the light
She got down but she never got tired
Shes gonna make it through the night
Shes gonna make it through the night
But mama thats where the fun is
But mama thats where the fun is
Mama always told me not to look into the eyes of the sun
But mama thats where the fun is
Some brimstone baritone anticyclone rolling stone preacher from the east
Says "Dethrone the dictaphone hit it in its funny bone
thats where they expect it least"
And some new-mown chaperone was standin in the corner
watching the young girls dance
And some fresh-sown moonstone was messin with his frozen zone reminding him of romance
The calliope crashed to the ground
But she was
Blinded by the light
revved up like a deuce
another runner in the night
Madman drummers bummers Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat
In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat
With a boulder on my shoulder feelin kinda older
I tripped the merry-go-round
With this very unpleasin sneezin and wheezin
the calliope crashed to the ground
Now Scott with a slingshot finially found a tender spot and throws his lover in the sand
And some bloodshot forget-me-not said daddys within earshot save the buckshot turn up the band
Some silicone sister with a manager mister told me I go what it takes
She said "Ill turn you on sonny to something strong"
Obviously, this was an attempt by the Chela at Optical SETI.
It's not their fault we have a different definition of "optical"....
www.eFax.com are spammers
If I'm doing my calculations correctly, I get a figure of ~1.436 x 10^57 photons per second coming from the source, assuming a fully spherical distribution...
GStreamer - The only way to stream!
This GRB was 5 billion light years away. That means they had 5 billion years to prepare for this and take evasive measures. Yet they did not.
Gee, maybe if they had 10 billion years to prepare, they might have found time to do something about it!
Since it was an extraordinary x-ray discharge from a great distance with no other apparent discharges (radio, infrared, visible, etc), I have to wonder if continued observation will eventually yield those at a later time. If so, how would that be interpreted? (Not only regarding the cause/aftermath of the event itself, but also interference by interstellar materials and possible changes to em propagation.)
;)
I don't know much science, but I know enough to make science teachers nervous
...to 10 billion years. Problem solved.
Glad it is just gamma rays, if it were in infrared or even visible light, somebody would probably blame the burst for the global temperature rise.
they are staring to play good base ball now.
You get this video about actual observations of intercelestial bodies manipulating the sun with what are termed lasers, and then there are passes from what is deemed "wormhole" technology that arrives near the sun from a trailable distance that could be seen as perhaps millions of lightyears away because it can be visually traced.
Then of'course there is the meteor over 4-times larger than Planet Jupiter, and NASA doesn't report any of this.
Yay homebrew and independent astronomers!
Weirdly, it didn’t look out of the ordinary in visible light.
I don't see how this is weird. The room didn't get any brighter when they bombarded my knee with x-rays when they were looking at my torn meniscus.
http://www.bynarystudio.com
For some reason, other along the equator have perspective to see the 2nd "dead" sun light-up as it rises above the Horizon with the local Solar Sun in this constelation. Can be seen from Sri Lanka, for example. The video of that can be seen here. Many more on Nibiru as this is what will be the flyby known as Planet-X that is expected by US Navy to discharge gravity and slow Earth rotation to displace over 500 thousand cubic miles of sea water to cover all the planet except Tibet (aka "Roof of the Heavens") and Colorado around Aspen.
I posted another response about Wormhole technology seen used around the Sun, in this video. Look at that Meteor 4x larger than Jupiter at frame 2:29 that NASA never told anyone about. Wormhole appears millions of lightyears away and can see it's entire waypoint trail off in the distance and then emerge right next to the Solar sun at 2:49. Nothing from NASA... What do they get money for again, ahh, their recent movie Red Planet was a blockbuster but I don't think it's going to be anywhere as real as the government movies from China and India that will appear soon.
My Optics! The goggles to nothing!
stargated you
Turns out it was caused by the Death Star.
Everyone's a$$ feels a little...warm, and incontinent. :-(
I wonder if the burst was close enough to LIGO for it to pick up a Gravity Wave? That's the theory anyway that gravity waves should be measurable in association with GRBs... But waves in the ocean travel much slower than the wind that creates them, so maybe there's a lag between the event and the actual measured wave.
Namaste
I am kind of impressed that the programmers anticipated excessive gamma rays and instituted measures to prevent damage. Your standard-issue security and digital cameras don't do that.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
Did i get it right? if i take the difference in distance into account naively, then the radioation itensity at the source was 10^12 times higher than the brightest source we see normally?
octave:13> 100*(5e9/50e3)^2
ans = 1.0000e+12
glad i am far away!
Colonized the galaxy and STILL no IPv6?!
trying to build DMZs by blowing up star systems
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
If you had read the last line of TFS you would know that "Weirdly, it didn't look out of the ordinary in visible light" (incidentally, why they think it's weird that something that emits X-rays looks ordinary in visible light?)
It was only Superman's X-ray vision that was blinded, his ordinary vision is still super. Now MacGyver has agreed to help by improvising a pair of X-ray eyeglasses using a dentist's X-ray machine, two rubber bands, an Etch-a-Sketch, and a discarded box of Cheerios.
... somebody simply fired up the next-gen Windows system over there.
Not to worry, the bugs are ironed out by now... ...or are they?
Cue in the maniac laughter.
And in Astronomy news, scientists working on the Alien Lifeform Contact and Environmental Evaluation project based in the Smeilstrom Cluster announced today that despite repeated efforts to make contact with alien life, they have so far failed utterly. Today, the scientist sent the last coded message in the hopes that they might receive a last-minute reply from some distant alien civilization, and began preparations to decommission the facility.
"It's maddening", said Professor Kjalksbon, as he prepared the send the final Gamma Burst Encoded message. "We know that according to probability, there should be intelligent life nearly everywhere. Yet after several billion years of transmission, we have still received no reply! We had a highly promising Galaxy some 5 billion light years away, right next to the Goorks Penal Colony, but even though conditions seem perfect for intelligent life we've received nothing more promising than some insignificant irregularities in the radio spectrum."
Further investigation revealed the irregularity was most likely caused when an attempted escape ended in a stolen comet breaking up and crashing into a gas giant orbiting a nearby star, a barren system devoid of any possibility of life.
Some critics have postulated that alien civilizations might not notice, or be able to understand the messages, or even worse, be physically vulnerable to the emissions. When asked for a response to such criticisms, the Professor replied "Utter nonsense. How could any intelligent life form fail to notice such an unusual event?" He went on to state that "we know very well that an intelligent civilization would certainly be able to observe such events and have no trouble responding in a timely manner, it's very simple technology that any primitive society could produce, which is why we stuck with such a rudimentary transmission medium".
When pressed on the possibility that the signals might actually be harming, or possibly even destroying other forms of life, thus preventing a reply, he scoffed "Riiiight. Well, I suppose it might have an adverse effect if life were based on some form of Carbon, but that's an utterly ridiculous idea." Our interview was cut short as the professor was called away on a final systems decommission check, and could be heard chuckling to himself "Carbon based life, who comes up with these questions?"
So ends the search for other intelligent life in this sector of the Universe. With this environmental impact study completed, it paves the way for development of a new Frueqsbald park, which promoters estimate could produce enough additional revenue to pull them out of their recent economic collapse. The parent company plans on moving forward with the demolition project next Quantar, which will require a staggering 67 singularities in order to rid the region of excess mass. The company already has the dumping permits lined up to dispose of the singularities in the Aaaljervont region, a move which has not been without its own controversy.
Back to you in the studio, Carl.