massive outerspace explosion

[loopcycle]

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060223_explosion.html

This might be the largest gamma-ray burst ever observed, and astronomers say its pretty close. IF its a GRB...

GRBs are the largest universal destructive force/explosion that scientists know about (short of a complete collapse of our universe).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_ray_burst
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/gamma/

[Father Goose]

Gamma Rays....affecting me...argh.....grrrr.....GGRRAAAAWWRRRR!!

HULK SMASH!!!!

[E.B.S]

VERY interesting read. I'll be looking forward to what other evidence/theories they can come out with on the subject. Thanks a lot.

[[W33T] JimmytehHand8]

I'm not too worried yet. Once it happens then I'll be worried. A supernova occuring nearby sounds a helluva lot more threatening.

[atomicbob]

I was wondering that myself. How big is the blast radius (that's splash zone for you gameheads) of a super nova?

:dunno:

[atomicbob]

I love the internet....

Astronomer Fred Kaler writes about Betelgeuse


Author Notes:

We all know about Betelgeuse. People can identify Betelgeuse. The red color indicates that it is very cool. But you can also point out that it is rather far away from us. And if it's cold, and very far away from us, than it has to be incredibly large. And so it is an example of a red supergiant. And as a red supergiant, you could place Betelgeuse near our sun, and it's something like the orbit of Mars would be inside of Betelgeuse, the surface. It's huge; it's comparable to the size of our solar system, which is greatly larger than our sun. Another thing that you could point out is that stars only get to be supergiants when they're very near the end of their lifetime, and when they're very near the end of their lifetime, it turns out that red supergiants that are that massive are likely to go supernova, well, any day now. For all we know, Betelgeuse has just gone supernova. The distance is something like a thousand light-years away. Betelgeuse is about a thousand light years away. And if Betelgeuse has gone supernova anytime in the last thousand years, the light of this supernova explosion could be speeding to us as we speak -- maybe it will arrive tonight. And suddenly Betelgeuse will flash and be brighter than a million full moons in the sky -- al up above us. It would be a spectacular sight. It would turn the night into daytime. You'd be able to not only read by it, it wouldn't be as hot as the sun, but it would be incredibly bright. It would be like a light bulb above you. And, it'd be very spectacular having this star blowing itself to bits. And you could also tie it into the idea of the killing radius of a supernova. Well, if our sun went supernova, just the blast wave would destroy Earth. But if the nearest star to our sun, Alpha Centauri, went supernova -- it won't -- but if a star at that distance went supernova, there would be very heavy damage here on Earth. If nothing else, by bolometric heating, and electromagnetic pulses, and cosmic rays, there would be no ozone left, and so on and so on. Largely, you'd have deaths, giga-deaths; billions of people would die if a star exploded to close. However, if a star very far away exploded supernova, there would be a bright point in the sky. So there has to be some middle ground where if the star went supernova closer than some distance, it would cause substantial damage here on Earth. And if the star was farther away, the effects would be substantially less -- something you would call the killing radius -- how far away does a supernova have to explode from Earth before it no longer causes big damage here on the ground -- to you and me, mom and pop, who never heard of a supernova. And people argue back and forth -- there are a lot of unknown effects that go into those sorts of calculations. a typical figure might be 100 light years away. So if a supernova happened 10 years away, start kissing your loved ones. So if a supernova happens much farther away, say 1000 light years away from Earth, well it might make a stir, but it won't have much lethal effect. The killing radius has substantial uncertainty to it, but it's at least of order of 100 light years, and there's uncertainty close to a factor of ten, closer or farther away. So, you can have your listeners looking up, and imagining if Betelgeuse got brighter, by far, than our sun. What would be the effect here on Earth? Well, Betelgeuse is about 1000 light years away, so we are probably outside of the killing radius of Betelgeuse. Betelgeuse could go off as a supernova tonight, but we would probably be okay. It would be a fun, spectacular light show, and astronomers would get a wealth of data, and things like that, but we probably would not have deaths here on Earth.


Thanks to:

Brad Schaefer
Associate Professor of Physics
Louisiana State University
Department of Physics & Astronomy
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

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http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/gamma/milkyway.html


Thorsett estimated that if the burster were located near the center of our galaxy, some 30,000 light-years away, the ozone depletion would be a few percent, comparable to that produced by natural disasters like large volcanic eruptions, very intense solar flares, or even a meteor impact on the scale of the one that exploded over Tunguska, Siberia in 1908.

If the burster were closer, say less than 3,000 light-years away, the gamma-ray flux received in a few tens of seconds could wipe out the entire ozone layer for years to come. At the very least, the drastic increase in solar ultraviolet radiation reaching Earth's surface would cause severe skin cancers. For humans and other animals, slow starvation would likely result, as the harmful ultraviolet flux inhibited plant growth and damaged and altered ecosystems supporting the food chain. As in a nuclear winter, the nitric oxides darkening our skies could also cause acid rains and significant cooling of the Earth's surface. Such pollutants would take decades to settle out of the stratosphere.

But that's not all. In addition to the chemical changes in the atmosphere, the nuclear interactions induced by the high-energy gamma rays would rapidly produce huge quantities of radioactive nucleids, such as carbon-14, which has a half-life of 5,700 years. Of course, winds would distribute this fallout worldwide.




Depending on what the mechanism for producing a gamma-ray burst actually is, a nearby burst could wreak even more havoc. Nir Shaviv and Arnon Dar of the Israel Institute of Technology have explored a particularly devastating model for generating gamma-ray bursts from co-orbiting pairs of neutron stars. All neutron star pairs eventually spiral together, losing energy through gravitational radiation as predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity.

Shaviv and Dar postulate that as the neutron stars begin their own catastrophic merger, jets of matter would be flung from the system at nearly the speed of light. These atoms and ions would be so energetic that they would absorb visible starlight and re-emit gamma rays, which we would detect as a gamma-ray burst. Impinging on our fair planet shortly after the horrific flash of gamma rays, the energetic particles themselves would join in the destruction, triggering still more deadly atmospheric cascades of nuclear interactions lasting up to a month.

These authors and others note that known pairs of neutron stars exist in our galaxy, including one within about 1,500 light-years. This knowledge has led to the speculation that in the past the Earth has found itself uncomfortably close to a violent neutron star merger. Some estimates hold that one occurs within about 3,000 light-years of the sun every 100 million years on average. Intriguingly, this timescale is roughly the same as the time between mass extinctions in our planet's geological record.

[atomicbob]

I have a sneaking suspicion that the massive gamma ray burst is really a cover-up for some WorldCom stock market scam.

:hehehe: