THank you all so much. You’re such good folk. We have the best readers in the world.
The Launch has been a success…
by CJ | Aug 16, 2013 | Journal | 14 comments
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Apropos of very little, there is a new nova visible in the northern sky:
http://www.space.com/22385-star-explosion-nova-delphini-2013-photos.html
First time there has been a naked eye visible nova in years (Mag 4 and climbing).
Scared me for a moment there! At 2240-45 Friday I was out for a few moments and looked up. I saw a S-N satellite pass into the umbra. Then something “winked” at me from the head of the Dragon! In a second or so it flashed up to 1st magnitude, and then back to obscurity. It was after the satellite had gone! Then a moment later the ISS came over from the WNW, and disappeared into the shadow about the same place! I figure a third satellite turned and flashed a solar reflection. It was so quick, too quick for a SN. Gamma ray flash? Naw, too rare.
Thanks, Chondrite! We’re having clear skies right now—maybe we can catch it!
Neat!
Hard to say. You may just have witnessed something unique…or a piece of something turning, indeed.
glad it was NOT a gamma ray flash. According to what I’ve seen on shows like “The Universe”, etc., a gamma ray flash within say 100 light years would be fatal to all life on Earth if it were full on facing us.
So big an universe, we forget there are some not-so-nice things out there, and I don’t just mean the Borg.
One of the first I ever read about was Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Wind From the Sun”, describing solar sail powered spacecraft engaged in organized races. The story ended with a solar flare that required all of the racers to abandon their ships and get to shelter. The main character’s ship was allowed to continue on without him, and eventually became the fastest artificial object in the solar system. What I was impressed with was the actual science of the solar flare that caused the evacuation. First time I knew that Old Sol wasn’t the benevolent stellar mass that I thought he was.
Gamma ray bursts, EMPs, Solar Mass Ejections—it’s a rough universe out there. Fortunately space is wide.
It’s possible old Betelgeuse has already gone bang, but that we haven’t seen it yet. I was, about age 10, fascinated by a newspaper article saying that an astronomer happened to be watching a star that just winked out, and it said it happened back 30,000 years ago, which was when Neanderthals were in Europe. I wondered what was the cosmic luck that had one person watching, perhaps, the demise of another world, at the right moment… the only one to know it happened…
It was probably a great deal more complicated than that, in the modern way of explaining it, but it was a pretty sobering thought for a 10-year-old. I thought—What if our sun went, and there would only be one person to see it go, and all we’d ever done as a planet just—vanished.
I thought about that a lot.
One ought not ignore the risk of Sirius going nova. It’s big (2.02 sols), hot (A1V, 9,940K), young (2-3E8 years) and close (8.6 LY). Such puppies are the epitome of the “live fast, die young, leave a good looking corpse” stars.
One thing we know: something near where we are now blew up a long time ago…or we wouldn’t have an iron core and all the nice metals.
How to sterilize a whole galaxy?
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2013/ngc1232/
No need to look so far: the New Scientist just had an article about something that happened in 775 AD, when our own sun threw a lot of magnetism towards earth. Researchers looking at carbon-14 in treerings in Japan found this spike, and it was corroborated by findings from Finland as a world-wide event.
They think a comet hit the sun on the side facing us, and this caused a massive ejection. Apparently these can be either high-magnetism and low mass, or the other way round. The one kind is a lot harder to find in the geological record, but they’ve found documented evidence that points to these things happening, though quite rarely. There was a smaller one in the time of telegraph lines to the American West, that electrified the lines and caught a lot of telegraph offices on fire. Then there’s the one in 775 that they found in the carbon-14 of the treerings.
They said, if something like that should happen now, with all the exposed electrical lines, and everything stored magnetically on computers etc., it would have an enormous impact on our civilisation.
And just 3 days before I read that, APOD had a picture of all the comets that are more than 140 meters across and come near the earth: it looked like a ball of blue thread around the sun. So if one of those goes off course a bit and hits the sun (a much larger target than the earth), it would still be likely to cause a great deal of damage to our civilisation here on earth.
Sometimes, it seems a wonder we’re all still here!
The last time such a big magnetic burst caught the earth nobody was using electricity or magnetism (except for compasses?), so people mainly noticed the auroras much lower than usual. If it happened
Sorry, that last paragraph got displaced, it should be in the place of They said, if something like that should happen; I should have checked the preview!
I didn’t think the Carrington Event (1859) was caused by a comet. I just know that the auroras were visible as far south as Cuba and Hawaii. I’d be rather surprised if a comet had enough mass to have any effect on the sun at all; the Sun eats comets and other cosmic debris all the time, with nary a burp. I’ll ask my astrophysicist friend how big a piece would have to impact the sun to make it react, but I suspect it would be more Jupiter-sized than cometary.
I handed my NewScientist on to the next reader, so I can’t check it. Maybe it was an asteroid instead of a comet? I get those two confused all the time.
I think the article said something about if it hit when there was a lot of sunspot activity, if the surface was disturbed already, it could trigger something bigger.
What it triggered wouldn’t be a sun-wide event, just a local eruption, which would only be dangerous if it happened to be pointing at the Earth. They mentioned a ‘suspicious coincidence’ observed by modern astronomers when a large burst travelled away from the sun as a comet likely hit the sun just about then and there, but because it was on the other side of the sun from earth they couldn’t say for sure if that was what happened.
Sorry, not being an astronomer, I’ve forgotten too many of the important details of the argument.
I’m wondering about climate and clothing right now.
A few summers ago, we had highs above 100*F for more than a week here and a major drought that affected Texas. Another summer, we had highs above 100*F for nearly a week, but avoided a drought. Our temperatures this summer have been (I think) about normal, but it has “seemed” hotter to me without my air conditioner’s compressor working. At home, I’m mostly in shorts.
This has me wondering if the frescoes and tile works we’ve seen from Greece and Rome and the Middle East were not simply because cloth was more rare and expensive and cultural values were different, but because the weather was hot enough that lots of clothing was a bad idea.
That begs the question, since we do have climate shifts, hotter and colder, and since we may be heading into a warming trend, are we likely to see people wearing less as a practical, necessary adaptation to the weather? (I suppose the answer is obvious, but it seems like a question to think about.)
—–
Hmm, regarding electromagnetism, I would presume that any equipment, such as hard drives or flash drives or CD’s and DVD’s that are not plugged in, would not be affected by a charge or pulse event induced by a solar flare or by some man-made event (yikes) but I’m not sure. Would archived data be safe, or would it be wiped / damaged also by a pulse?