The Real Death Star

S&F for the interesting read.

Let's say a star blew up 8000 light years away...wouldn't it take 8000 years for the gamma rays and everything to reach us? Plus since it's 8000 light years away isn't there a possibility it has already blown up and the gamma rays are already on their way? Either way we would never know it actually happened until it reaches us.

Originally posted by eriktheawful
reply to post by orionthehunter

 

An interesting proposal.

However I can see a couple of problems with the idea.

1) We would need to place the devices in deep space as you said. However, for it to be effective, we would need it to be literally light years into deep space. Our current technology that we have such a trip would take generations to get there.

2) I don't know if we have such a device at this time. Or at least one that would work to give us the information we need.

Still, I think it's a great idea, if nothing else than to use it to communicate faster for deep space.

It wouldn't take generations if we could engineer a system where the Quantum particles are piggybacked and delivered to the target area entwined in the photons of a laser beam.

Fire the laser at a target star system, deliver the entangled photons and wait for the local Earth based 'twins' to alter when the distant ones do.

If we could use light to deliver quantum light particles, it would a year for every light year distance to arrive and begin monitoring...admittedly in the case of WR 104, it would still take 8000 years to arrive and begin monitoring, so unless we can engineer 'subspace devices' or some other sci-fi technology, we'd have to wait a very long time to get a reading.

Closer systems would only take a few years to arrive though.

Originally posted by malvy
One big fail concerning this thread: astronomers and astrophysicists still don't know what actually causes Gamma rays bursts, that explanation about Wolf-Rayet stars is still just an hypothesis.

A supernova (or in this case, a hypernova) will produce gamma rays, through the gravitational collapse and the sheer energy released in the process. Don't give us that old "scientists know nothing" story.

In any case, I think 8000 ly is too far away to cause any real harm. Now, if a supernova occured 800 ly away, that would be scary.

reply to post by wildespace


I don't know wildespace, scientists reckon they've picked up Gamma rays from explosions from right across the Milky way, or detected them from as far away as 100,000 light years.

Originally posted by stutteringp0et
reply to post by stirling

 

Rest easy knowing that our rich, fat and lazy leaders might have enough notice to make it to the deep underground shelters and be spared to repopulate the earth.

That is exactly what isn't possible in this scenario. There would be no warning for anyone, not you and me, and not even the most powerful politician. By the time the GRB started hitting us it would already be too late. Within seconds it would be over and it would be too late to get underground to avoid the radiation.

Originally posted by eriktheawful

Can you supply data on the odds of this occurring within the next 1000 years. My calculation is 1 in 5.7 quadrillion taking into account the distance and the angle the star has to be at, and the location of earth. I really was hoping this was going to be about some REAL death star like in star wars instead of this big let down.


Mod Note: Big Quote – Please Review This Link.

Originally posted by MysterX
reply to post by wildespace

 

I don't know wildespace, scientists reckon they've picked up Gamma rays from explosions from right across the Milky way, or detected them from as far away as 100,000 light years.

Actually, they've detected them from much further away than that. Millions and even billions of light years away:

GRB 090429B

Now, after two years of painstaking analysis, astronomers studying the afterglow of the explosion say they're confident that the blast was the farthest explosion yet identified -- and at a distance of 13.14 billion light-years, a contender for the most distant object now known.

Source

Originally posted by eriktheawful
reply to post by stirling

 

I was running survival/prep ideas through my head while researching this subject.

The long GRBs last from 2 seconds to around 110 seconds, and if you were deep underground, you would avoid being bathed in it.

However....all our animals and agriculture isn't underground. Things would be dying off and at some point you'd have to come out of your underground bunker. At that point, you would be entering a "ghost town" of a world. All the structures there, but just about everything dead.

There are several stars that are "near" us that are about ready to die by going super or hyper nova:

WR 104 is one, estimated as any day now to the next 100 years.

Eta Carinae is another:

Within the next million years (that's soon in astronomical time, hehehe)

Betelgeuse is another, they think anywhere in 1000 years to a million years.


I know......it's too bad they can't be more precise, but keep in mind that most super or hyper novas that we study are far away and the precursors can be hard to research.

You forgot your own stats.. If you could survive the initial radiation burst, you would not survive the additional solar radiation from our own star due to a lessened ozone layer, and all the brand new Nitrogen compounds in the air you used to be able to breath. Gamma Ray bursts would also decimate Oceanic Algae populations pretty much eliminating one of the greatest sources of oxygen for earth. I wouldn't want to hang around in a world with a limited supply of oxygen and an excess of brand new "smog"compounds.

I have a question too, would a Long burst have any potential to initiate a release of methane from sediment or permafrost?

There is also this article

www.newscientist.com...

reply to post by eriktheawful


Isn't Beetlegeuse overdue now?? I thought it was expected a few years ago, and it's "late" so to speak, that or their understanding of the star is lack luster.

are you eluding to "nibiru"?

because YES exoplanets are real and they do match the ancient stories
their behavior has been recently examined very closely and exolanets DO orbit in highly elliptical orbits
they come in, then zip around the sun then zip right back out

space.com did the story

here
www.space.com...

Originally posted by Hijinx
reply to post by eriktheawful

 

Isn't Beetlegeuse overdue now?? I thought it was expected a few years ago, and it's "late" so to speak, that or their understanding of the star is lack luster.

There was a publication back in 2009 that made people think that it was going to happen soon:

Due to misunderstandings caused by the 2009 publication of the star's 15% contraction,[46][75] Betelgeuse has frequently been the subject of scare stories and rumors suggesting that it will explode within a year, leading to exaggerated claims about the consequences of such an event.[119][120] The timing and prevalence of these rumors have been linked to broader misconceptions of astronomy, particularly to doomsday predictions relating to the Mayan calendar.[121][122] In their 2012 study, physicists at the Space Sciences Laboratory point out that the apparent contraction in the star's diameter may be due to the complex dynamics in the star's surrounding nebula and not the star itself,[48] reconfirming that until we better understand the nature of mass loss, predicting the timing of a supernova will remain a challenge.

Source

Originally posted by infinitymindbox
are you eluding to "nibiru"?

because YES exoplanets are real and they do match the ancient stories
their behavior has been recently examined very closely and exolanets DO orbit in highly elliptical orbits
they come in, then zip around the sun then zip right back out

space.com did the story

here
www.space.com...

No this thread is not about Nibiru.

It's about Wolf-Rayet stars, and how they can emit GRBs (Gamma Ray Bursts).

Please go back and reread the OP of the thread.

reply to post by eriktheawful


betelgeuse is 600 something light years away, when it goes it's not gonna be anything catastrophic for us here on earth. I was just saying I thought it was due, but if that was all misinformation so be it. lol

reply to post by Hijinx


It is due, but that could happen in anything from 1 year to 10,000 years. Cosmic time-scales aren't like our time-scales. "Soon" may mean a million years.

My understanding is that the rotational axis of a star like this would need to be perfectly aligned with Earth in order for us to be in danger of a "direct hit" from a GRB. If the rotational axis was off by even 16 degrees, the burst of gamma rays wouldn't come anywhere near the Solar System. In fact, the central axis of the "beam" would miss us by something like 2500 light years!

Originally posted by eriktheawful

The answer is: WR 104 has already gone hypernova, most likely sometime between 7,900 and 8,000 years ago.

Do you mind if I ask for your source on this? 100 years seems like an unusually precise figure for an estimate of time until a star goes supernova.

I did a brief Google search and the most accurate figure I found quoted was "within a hundred thousand years", which is a significantly longer estimate and more in keeping with the answers usually found when trying to predict evolutionary changes in stellar objects.

Originally posted by wildespace

In any case, I think 8000 ly is too far away to cause any real harm. Now, if a supernova occured 800 ly away, that would be scary.

Funnily enough there is a Wolf-Rayet star 800 light years from Earth likely to end its life in a Type Ic supernova, it's part of the Gamma Velorum system.

There's also a white dwarf star in the IK Pegasi system only 150 light years distant which is likely to exceed the Chandrasekhar limit and explode as a Type Ia supernova.

Originally posted by Mogget
My understanding is that the rotational axis of a star like this would need to be perfectly aligned with Earth in order for us to be in danger of a "direct hit" from a GRB. If the rotational axis was off by even 16 degrees, the burst of gamma rays wouldn't come anywhere near the Solar System. In fact, the central axis of the "beam" would miss us by something like 2500 light years!

GRBs are highly unlikely in our galaxy the milky way contains a lot of heavy elements.This makes it very unlikely for a gamma ray burst to occur in our backyard. And in other galaxies there to far away too hurt us. The reason heavy elements matter is they tend to be lost when a star increases its spin. Thus lowering the stars mass and not allowing the spin to increase. A star has to have no heavy elements and start spinning faster and faster to release a GRB.

Just so you know we pick up several GRBs and were still here. And the only way we can do that is if there pointed at us

Originally posted by dimethylmercury

Originally posted by eriktheawful

The answer is: WR 104 has already gone hypernova, most likely sometime between 7,900 and 8,000 years ago.

Do you mind if I ask for your source on this? 100 years seems like an unusually precise figure for an estimate of time until a star goes supernova.

I did a brief Google search and the most accurate figure I found quoted was "within a hundred thousand years", which is a significantly longer estimate and more in keeping with the answers usually found when trying to predict evolutionary changes in stellar objects.

You are absolutely correct. I misread this article when I was making that post (glad I didn't do that in the OP of the thread):

Source

I think that most experts agree that the WR star in WR 104 will go supernova within (astronomically speaking) the near future. By that I mean the next few hundred thousand years.

Originally posted by wildespace

Originally posted by malvy
One big fail concerning this thread: astronomers and astrophysicists still don't know what actually causes Gamma rays bursts, that explanation about Wolf-Rayet stars is still just an hypothesis.

A supernova (or in this case, a hypernova) will produce gamma rays, through the gravitational collapse and the sheer energy released in the process. Don't give us that old "scientists know nothing" story.

Im not denying that, our own sun produces gamma rays as well. Gamma Rays Bursts is a whole other thing, scientist still don't know what produces them. The hypernova explanations, as I said earlier, is just a hypothesis. For all we know they could be the echoes of a war fought long long ago across our galaxy.