Historic explosion in space today!

Originally posted by stikkinikki
reply to post by Rren

 

C'est la vie!

two thoughts:
I wonder if we will get sophisticated enough to use HAARP or a device like that to buffer the effect of things of this nature.

GRBs are a special type of supernova. When a very massive star explodes, the inner core collapses, forming a black hole, while the outer layers explode outwards. Due to a complex and fierce collusion of forces in the core, two beams of raw fury can erupt out of the star, mind-numbing in their power. Composed mostly of high-energy gamma rays, they can carry more energy in them than the Sun will put out in its entire lifetime. They are so energetic we can see them clear across the Universe, and having one too close would be bad.

If one had an enclosed environment with a transparent covering that blocked harmful sun rays and gamma bursts then one could possibly weather that sort of event.

chandra.harvard.edu...



Astronomers have made the best ever determination of the power of a supernova explosion that was visible from Earth long ago. By observing the remnant of a supernova and a light echo from the initial outburst, they have established the validity of a powerful new method for studying supernovas.



Using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, ESA's XMM-Newton Observatory, and the Gemini Observatory, two teams of researchers studied the supernova remnant and the supernova light echo that are located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a small galaxy about 160,000 light years from Earth. They concluded that the supernova occurred about 400 years ago (in Earth’s time frame), and was unusually bright and energetic.

[... snip*]


In 2004, scientists used Chandra to determine that a supernova remnant, known as SNR 0509-67.5 in the LMC, was a so-called Type Ia supernova, caused by a white dwarf star in a binary system that reaches a critical mass and explodes.


[... snip*]


These results appear in two recently accepted papers in The Astrophysical Journal. The first discusses the spectrum obtained by Gemini, led by Rest. The second, with Badenes as first author, details the Chandra and XMM observations of SNR 0509-67.5. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for the agency's Science Mission Directorate. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Mass.

Please visit the link provided for the complete story.

www4.ncsu.edu...

SNR 0509-67.5 is the youngest of the SNRs observed in our sample (other than 1987A, which we serendipitously obtained IRAC images of in the field of view of another pointing). At an age of only ~400 years, this object is nearly an identical age to Kepler's SNR in our own galaxy, and is of similar origin, being the remnant of a thermonuclear supernova. The resolution issues of MIPS can be clearly seen in this image, as the SNR is only ~30 arcseconds in diameter! The faint eastern rim can also be seen on this stretch. In Borkowski et al. (2006), we explored the possibility of this being due to a contrast in densities between the eastern and western edges of the remnant.

www.aavso.org...

The intense gamma-ray burst GRB 080319B was detected in gamma ray, x-ray, optical light, and early indications by two automated cameras suggest that the optical afterglow of the burst may have briefly reached naked-eye visibility (mag ~ 5.76, GCN 7445, Cwiok et al) within 60 seconds of the onset. It is highly unlikely the burst was caught visually, but it is possible the burst may have been detected if any observers were monitoring this area of the sky (e.g. for minor planet searching).


The coordinates of the burst are: RA: 14 31 40.98 , Dec: +36 18 8.8 (J2000)

Please visit the link provided for the complete story.

Bad Astronomy forum:


Don Alexander: Yep.

This is it.

The monster event everyone has been waiting for.

Swift detected a GRB this morning, GRB 080319A. It slewed to the GRB (which was discovered to have a very faint optical afterglow), and several robotic telescope systems observed it too - mostly without results. Several of these systems have wide-field sky imagers that reach 8th - 12 magnitude in single shots, usually a domain where afterglows don't get to.

But not long after, just roughly 10 degrees away, another GRB exploded, and this one was a blast. It's one of the brightest GRBs ever detected!! Since quite a few robots were already pointing in this direction, at least three wide-field systems recorded images before and during the explosion which lastet about a minute. One of these is a video system that seems to yield a time resolution of maybe a second per image or so.

Of course, multiple larger robots then slewed to the GRB, some of them also catching the peak magnitudes.

The peak magnitudes reported still diverge a bit, but the consensus is ~ 5.5!!!

Therefore, as mentioned before, under dark skies it was visible to the naked eye!!!!

Now, the real clou is that the redshift is 0.937!! This means the GRB exploded roughly when the universe was half it's current age, and the distance to the event is very roughly 10 BILLION light years!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Furthermore, I've just figured out that this event was nothing less than the brightest optical flash ever detected. The luminosoty at peak exceeds 10^17 solar luminosities, so this basically outshines the entire universe for a few seconds.

www.canspice.org...

But get this! At least three telescopes were observing the field just before the GRB went off! RAPTOR observed the field for an hour before it went off. The REM telescope in Chile observed the field at least 100 seconds before it went off. And the Pi of the Sky observed it sixteen seconds before it went off.
That’s not all! Pi of the Sky has this sweet animation of the GRB.

Originally posted by theendisnear69
The sun is eventually going to explode and destroy all of humanity, so there's not much hope for us now is there

Was the December 26, 2004 Indonesian Earthquake and Tsunami
Caused by a Stellar Explosion 45,000 Light Years Away?
Sound Crazy? Read Carefully Below.
(Originally posted February 20, 2005)
Gamma Ray Bursts, Gravity Waves, and Earthquakes

Originally posted by theendisnear69
The sun is eventually going to explode and destroy all of humanity, so there's not much hope for us now is there

But not long after, just roughly 10 degrees away, another GRB exploded, and this one was a blast. It's one of the brightest GRBs ever detected!!

Originally posted by Ahabstar
it kind of makes one wonder about how a simple person from 2000 years with no understanding of radiation poisoning would describe witnessing such an event as a nearby gamma ray burst.

stuff there with a sign in the sky and people just dropping dead left and right and seeing the survivors with severe radiation burns as diseased masses

Originally posted by dampnickers

Global warming? What global warming? Where I live, there has been a siginificant amount of global RAINING!
It's cold, wet and windy...
If Al Gore is correct, then it should be hot and arid... the total opposite is true.

en.wikipedia.org...




The GRB's redshift was measured to be 0.937[5], which means that the explosion occurred about 7.5 billion (7.5×109) years ago, and it took the light that long to reach us. This is roughly half the time since the Big Bang.[2]. The first scientific paper submitted[6] on the event, suggested that the GRB could have easily been seen to a redshift of 16 (essentially to the time in the universe when stars were just being formed, well into the age of reionization) from a sub-meter sized telescope.


The afterglow of the burst set a new record for the "most intrinsically bright object ever observed by humans in the universe",[2] 2.5 million times brighter than the brightest supernova to date, SN 2005ap.[7]
It was speculated that the afterglow was particularly bright due to the gamma jet focusing directly in our direction.[2]


A record for the number of observed burst with the same satellite on one day, four, was also set. This burst was named with the suffix B since it was the second burst detected that day. In fact, there were 5 GRBs detected in a 24 hour period, including GRB 080320[8].

www.badastronomy.com...

Let me put this in perspective for you. Imagine a one megaton nuclear weapon detonating. That’s roughly 50 times the explosive yield of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Devastating.

The Sun, every second of every day of every year, gives off 100 billion times this much energy. That’s every second. A star is a terrifying object.

In the few seconds that a gamma-ray burst lasts, it packs a million million million times that much energy into its beams. In other words, for those few ticks of a clock the GRB is sending out more energy than the Sun will in its entire lifetime.

There is, quite simply, no way to exaggerate the devastation of a gamma-ray burst.

Yet for all that, they are optically faint due to their terrible distance. At billions of light years away, even the Universe’s second biggest bangs are difficult to see.


So that’s what makes GRB 080319B (the second GRB seen on 2008 March 19) so incredible: distance measurements put it at 7.5 billion light years away, yet it was visible to the unaided eye had you just happened to be looking up at the sky at that moment.

Whoa.

This is the single brightest GRB ever seen in optical light, so as you can imagine reports are pouring in from observatories all over the world right now. Anything this bright must be extraordinary, and you can bet that astronomers will be falling over themselves to observe this incredible event. We still don’t know enough about GRBS; just what mechanisms focus those beams? We know black holes are at their core, powering these events, but how do the gravity and magnetic fields come together to generate forces like this? How tightly focused are the beams? Do they open at a one degree angle? 5? 10? Why does every GRB behave somewhat differently, with some lasting for seconds and others for minutes?

NewScientist.com: Could gamma-ray bursts lead us to ET?


A good way for an extraterrestrial civilisation to broadcast its existence to us would be to concentrate all the energy it can muster into a brief beam of radiation bright enough to reach us. But there's a catch: how could they be sure we'd be looking in the right direction at the right time?


One cunning tactic would be to steal the limelight from a dazzling astronomical event—ideally a gamma-ray burster, says Robin Corbet of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Bursts occur frequently, so the aliens could wait till they see one nearly diametrically opposite the Earth, so the burster, the aliens' planet and the Earth are in line. If they then sent a bright signal towards us, we'd be sure to see it, having trained our telescopes on the gamma-ray blast.


Because the sources of gamma-ray bursts are extremely remote, aliens in our own Galaxy would see them at approximately the same time as us. If they beamed their own message straight away, the arrival time of the signal could give us a rough idea of how far away their planet lies.