14 ms·
A Binary Star Is About to Go Supernova and Could Produce a Gamma-Ray Burst
- baddash 8y agoFrom the article itself: "Of course, it's important to bear in mind that 'just about to explode' means something different in cosmic terms versus human terms. It could happen at any time in the... next few hundred thousand years." So a clickbait title.
- ProAm 8y agoOnly to your relative position.
- prolikewh0a 8y ago,
- lalaithion 8y agoFalse; it is not the same time everywhere. Two people travelling at different speeds will disagree about what order events happened in, and there is no privileged reference frame.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoThey will disagree about what order some events happen in. But those events are causally unrelated to each other, so it doesn't matter what order they happened in.
- 24gttghh 8y ago>Of course, it's important to bear in mind that "just about to explode" means something different in cosmic terms versus human terms. It could happen at any time in the... next few hundred thousand years.
- daxorid 8y agoI don't know what sort of luminosity a GRB would have at 8k LY. But if it's strong enough to be an ELE, that's still a pretty short timeframe, in case the expected GRB jets will be pointed at us. We'd need to not only get off the planet, but to another star system entirely.
- enkid 8y agoI doubt another solar system would be far enough away
- a1369209993 8y agoIronically, in the specific case of a imminent gamma ray burst, we might actually have better luck staying on the planet, with eight thouand miles of rock and metal to act as ablative shielding. I'm not sure how far underground we'd need to be to survive the backscatter from eg the moon, though, and I doubt the planet would be habitable afterward anyway.
- TangoTrotFox 8y agoIt's not the gamma rays that kill you. In particular even with a supernova strength source, it's unlikely that the gamma rays would even have enough energy to get through the atmosphere to the point of meaningfully heating the ground. However, they would butcher and greatly change the atmosphere which, in turn, is what kills you - probably through a mechanism of massive amounts of UV and other high energy radiation now happily making its way down to us. As an example, a gamma ray burst is one possible hypothesis for the Ordovician extinction. Best case for survival would be to become multiplanetary. In particular the conditions that would be created would be survivable by the exact same technology that will be the baseline for human colonization on Mars.
- bcherny 8y ago> Best case for survival would be to become multiplanetary. How far away do you have to be to avoid getting gamma'd?
- emmett 8y agoI’m not enough of an astrophysicist to do this math myself, but what would this kind of burst look like from Earth? Observable w a telescope? W the naked eye? Enter a bomb shelter and save yourself?
- skykooler 8y agoThis star system is about 8000 light-years away. For comparison, in 1572 a different star, also about 8000 light-years away, was observed to go supernova. At its brightest, it was reported to be about as bright as Venus. This supernova would probably reach similar brightness levels.
- francisofascii 8y agoInteresting story. You have to wonder if the "Christmas" star was a supernova like this one. It suddenly appears, becomes visible during the day for a few weeks, then slowly vanishes for about a year.
- macintux 8y agoThere was a sci-fi short story about this, in which a team of explorers found the Christmas star...and the remnants of the civilization which wiped out as a consequence.
- syntheticnature 8y agoIt was "The Star", by Arthur C. Clarke. Worth noting that the viewpoint character is a Jesuit priest. https://sites.uni.edu/morgans/astro/course/TheStar.pdf https://sites.uni.edu/morgans/astro/course/TheStar.pdf
- hardlianotion 8y agoNever heard of it. Thanks!
- 8y ago
- everdev 8y agoAbout to? > It could happen at any time in the... next few hundred thousand years. I understand this is imminent on a cosmological timescale, but the title is click-baity.
- Brockenstein 8y agoIf you want to interpret it that way. If you have some idea of cosmological scale and time frames you're probably willing to read the headline in those terms. After all at 8,000 light years what we're seeing right now "just happened"... near the beginning of recorded human history. Does absolutely everything need to be written from the perspective of default human biases?
- cryptonector 8y agoIt's not click-baity. Any headline like this can only mean "about to on a cosmological scale", and I understood it as such immediately, and I also felt excited, and the excitement was warranted because the news really is exciting.
- spookthesunset 8y ago> Any headline like this can only mean "about to on a cosmological scale" Sorry, I also read it as "any day now" and I'm pretty sure anybody who is a layman on this topic also did the same. The title is plenty click-baity.
- lb1lf 8y ago-I had the unexpected pleasure of sitting next to a geologist on a domestic flight a few years ago; he explained about an unstable mountainous area he’d surveyed, stressing that it would come crashing down at some point. I inquired as to /when/ we could expect this to happen, as it sounded imminent. «Oh, any day now - definitely in the next 30-50,000 years!» And here I am, with project deadlines measured in hours...
- nsxwolf 8y agoWhy would "about to on a cosmological scale" make you feel excited? Are you planning on being around for a few hundred thousand more years?
- logotype 8y agoMaybe the explosion has already happened? But we still wouldn’t be able to see it yet due to the distance and speed of light...
- dotancohen 8y agoThat is called "not happened yet" in our lightcone. It's an easy concept to grasp, but many people resist considering an event to have not yet happened when it has not yet crossed our lightcone. If you are really interested, then I suggest Stephen Hawking's book A Brief History of Time.
- mitchty 8y agoYep, if we haven't observed it, it is effectively not happened. Same as finally observing some of the first galaxies created after the big bang. Speed of light ~= speed of information. If we haven't seen indication of it directly or indirectly, its at best an inference.
- bsmitty5000 8y agoIsn't there two events here: the actual supernova and our observation of the supernova. So the actual supernova event could have occurred but our observation is when it crosses our 'lightcone'?
- arnarbi 8y ago
- tehaugmenter 8y agoI would like to see Neil Degrasse Tyson do a season 2 of Cosmos with all these new discoveries. We're only going to keep discovering more.
- wiredfool 8y agoThis is a better article (From bad astronomy) about the same thing: https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/is-this-cosmic-sprinkler-surrounding-galaxys-next-gamma-ray-burst https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/is-this-cosmic-sprinkler-surro... In particular, the sciencealert article mentions "very old" Wolf-Rayet stars, which is a little strange given that they only last a few million years, and certainly are not old on any scale used for stellar lifetimes.
- ianai 8y agoI’m wondering what sort of physics research this opens up before the burst. I imagine it’s still producing energy levels otherwise difficult to create.
- agoodthrowaway 8y agoI always get excited when I read these things that I might be lucky enough to see a supernova in the sky in my lifetime (provided the gamma ray burst misses us!).
- jakelazaroff 8y agoI feel like being interested in space is an exercise in being simultaneously enthralled and disappointed. This sounds awesome! But, like with basically everything space-related, the scale is too immense for a human lifetime: > Of course, it's important to bear in mind that "just about to explode" means something different in cosmic terms versus human terms. It could happen at any time in the... next few hundred thousand years.
- shadykiller 8y agoWith this close proximity, isn't there a good chance we may be hit directly with the gamma ray burst ? Shouldn't we be alarmed about another possible mass extinction event ?
- incompatible 8y agoTheoretically, if a gamma-ray burst was pointed directly at the Earth. I assume that the chance of that for a particular event is quite small.
- wiredfool 8y agoThe bad astronomy article says that this one is apparently pointed about 30 degrees away from us.
- valarauca1 8y agoI don't see how/why? Generally speaking it is exceptionally rare for a star to point directly at us. This is to an acurracy of millionth's of a degree, as the straight line travel across interstellar space is massive. So getting hit with a GRB is like winning the interstallar lottery. Secondly, if you cannot control it, or influence it. Worrying about it is just fantasizing. Humans tend to assume overly dramatic events are more likely then they actually are.
- GarrisonPrime 8y agoApparently they can clearly detect that the ejection from the poles is much slower than the ejection from the equator, which tells me the poles are probably directed away from Earth and the stars are being seen somewhat side-on. So I'm guessing any such burst will be directed away. Just a guess.
- Zelphyr 8y agoWhat could we do about it if we did find we were going to get hit directly with it?
- deleted 8y ago
- CathyWest 8y ago> 20 Brain Foods That Boost Memory And Concentration > Magnesium Deficiency Causes Heart Attacks! > This is What Happens to Your Body if You Eat Ginger Every Day > 15 Fruits that Burn Fat Like Crazy > This Is What Will Happen When You Eat Bananas Every Day > 17 Home Remedies for a Blocked or Stuffy Nose > This Is What Will Happen if You Eat Beetroot Daily > This Is What Might Happen When You Drink Lemon Water for 7 Days > This Happens To Your Body When You Eat Oatmeal Every Single Day > Foods that Burn Belly Fat > 5 Foods to Lower Blood Pressure Naturally > 20 Superfoods For People Over 50 > It's Never Too Late! 20 Super Foods That Prevent Osteoporosis The more I scroll the more convinced I become of the strong scientific rigour of this publication. I even saw a few ads from Elsevier, so you know it's the good stuff.
- hateful 8y agoTime to uncomment that code Microsoft! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18494690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18494690
- maskedinvader 8y agocame to the thread to say exactly that and you beat me to it. upvoted :)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sidcool 8y agoAbout to go in cosmic terms would mostly mean not earlier than a millennium.
- cxromos 8y agoabout?
- 8bitsrule 8y agoDon't think GRBs are all that worrisome, by comparison. It has recently been calculated that there is a 50-percent chance that a GRB-induced mass extinction on Earth has occurred in the past 500 million years. This abstract: ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.2506 https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.2506 ) links to a PDF of the entire paper. So the probability in a human lifetime is magnitudes less than a supervolcano event or big asteroid impact. According to ( https://phys.org337426962/pdf.pdf https://phys.org337426962/pdf.pdf ): "The researchers don't believe a GRB striking the Earth could penetrate the atmosphere, but do believe one could destroy the ozone layer". We started to do that to ourselves more than once, not long ago. We are by far the highest-probability danger to Earth life. Chlorofluorocarbons: check. Nuclear weapons: check. Back to less-likely (inhuman) radiation sources: In the late 8th century, tree rings in the northern hemisphere 'recorded' a one-year atmospheric increase of 1% in carbon-14 ... 20 times normal. Cause: 'an extremely intense burst of high-energy radiation'. Cause unknown, but could have been ... a coronal mass ejection (the Sun). ( https://www.nature.com/news/mysterious-radiation-burst-recorded-in-tree-rings-1.10768 https://www.nature.com/news/mysterious-radiation-burst-recor... )