Posted on 07/28/2016 7:54:07 AM PDT by LibWhacker
For most of 2016, astronomers have been viewing a ball of hot gas billions of light years away that is radiating the energy of hundreds of billions of suns. At its heart is an object a little larger than 10 miles across. And astronomers are not entirely sure what it is. If, as they suspect, the gas ball is the result of a supernova, then it’s the most powerful supernova ever seen.
Most astronomers today believe that one of the plausible reasons we have yet to detect intelligent life in the universe is due to the deadly effects of local supernova explosions within 100 light years that wipe out all life in a given region of a galaxy. While there is, on average, only one supernova per galaxy per century, there is something on the order of 100 billion galaxies in the observable Universe. Taking 10 billion years for the age of the Universe (it's actually 13.7 billion, but stars didn't form for the first few hundred million), Dr. Richard Mushotzky of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, derived a figure of 1 billion supernovae per year, or 30 supernovae per second in the observable Universe! In June of 2015, this flaring spot of light was found by the All Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASASSN) run by Ohio State astronomers and labelled ASASSN-15lh. Located about three billion light years distant, the source appears tremendously bright for anything so far away: roughly 200 times brighter than an average supernova, and temporarily 20 times brighter than all of the stars in our Milky Way Galaxy combined. The above-featured artist's illustration depicts a hypothetical night sky of a planet located across the host galaxy from the outburst.
“If you walked outside and saw a person who was six feet tall, and then someone who was six thousand feet tall, you would notice,” says team member Todd Thompson of Ohio State University. “You begin to question whether this is even a person.”
In the January 14, 2016 issue of the journal Science, the Ohio State team report that the object at the center could be a very rare type of star called a magnetar—but one so powerful that it pushes the energy limits allowed by physics.
Even in a discipline that regularly uses gigantic numbers to express size or distance, the case of this small but powerful mystery object in the center of the gas ball is so extreme that the team’s co-principal investigator, Krzysztof Stanek of The Ohio State University, turned to the movie This is Spinal Tap to find a way to describe it.
“If it really is a magnetar, it’s as if nature took everything we know about magnetars and turned it up to 11,” Stanek said. (For those not familiar with the comedy, the statement basically translates to “11 on a scale of 1 to 10.”)
The gas ball surrounding the object can’t be seen with the naked eye, because it’s 3.8 billion light years away. But it was spotted by the All Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN, pronounced “assassin”) collaboration. Led by Ohio State, the project uses a cadre of small telescopes around the world to detect bright objects in our local universe.
Though ASAS-SN has discovered some 250 supernovae since the collaboration began in 2014, the explosion that powered ASASSN-15lh stands out for its sheer magnitude. It is 200 times more powerful than the average supernova, 570 billion times brighter than our sun, and 20 times brighter than all the stars in our Milky Way Galaxy combined.
“We have to ask, how is that even possible?” said Stanek, professor of astronomy at Ohio State. “It takes a lot of energy to shine that bright, and that energy has to come from somewhere.”
“The honest answer is at this point that we do not know what could be the power source for ASASSN-15lh,” said Subo Dong, lead author of the Science paper and a Youth Qianren Research Professor of astronomy at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University.
He added that the discovery “may lead to new thinking and new observations of the whole class of superluminous supernova.” Todd Thompson, professor of astronomy at Ohio State, offered one possible explanation. The supernova could have spawned an extremely rare type of star called a millisecond magnetar, a rapidly spinning and very dense star with a very strong magnetic field.
To shine so bright, this particular magnetar would also have to spin at least 1,000 times a second, and convert all that rotational energy to light with nearly 100 percent efficiency, Thompson explained. It would be the most extreme example of a magnetar that scientists believe to be physically possible.
“Given those constraints,” he said, “will we ever see anything more luminous than this? If it truly is a magnetar, then the answer is basically no.”
The Hubble Space Telescope will help settle the question later this year, in part because it will allow astronomers to see the host galaxy surrounding the object. If the team finds that the object lies in the very center of a large galaxy, then perhaps it’s not a magnetar at all, and the gas around it is not evidence of a supernova, but instead some unusual nuclear activity around a supermassive black hole.
If so, then its bright light could herald a completely new kind of event, said study co-author Christopher Kochanek, professor of astronomy at Ohio State and the Ohio Eminent Scholar in Observational Cosmology. It would be something never before seen in the center of a galaxy.
If there is one every hundred years (on average) in a galaxy the size of the Milky Way, that’s a million every hundred million years, easily enough to suppress evolution and keep organisms at the single-cell level.
What does gravity have to do with it? The gravity hasn’t changed (much... there is some conversion of matter to energy, but at this distance, it’s probably like a moth passing a-Centauri.
>>>I think the problem with that assumption is that because it takes light 649 years to travel from Betelgeuse to Earth, we are actually seeing that star as it was 649 years ago. For all we know, it could have already gone supernova and we wouldn’t know it until the light (and radiation) reached us, which could happen anytime<<<
Geez, now I’m depressed. We might as well off ourselves or Elect Hillary.
It might have gone supernova 648 years ago.
You win.
The simple biochemistry of the notion that life is inevitable is absurd. The truth is that for all the (false) claims of “scientists discover life in a bottle!” we still can only explain spontaneous production of a few of the wrong nucleotides, and some idea how a lipid layer could be formed. It’s like saying you know how fully-functioning, self-replicating robots formed because you found some traces of metal ore.
We haven’t even found a single planet anything like Earth. I was reading about a supposed “super-Earth” in the “habitable zone.” The estimated temperature on this planet was 70 degrees below zero, so if there ever was any water, it would be locked tight in ice. And it was bathed in infra-red. They explained why it may not be bombarded with deadly radiation at regular intervals, but the point is that there was almost no available visible-spectrum light for photosynthesis.
And here’s the kicker no-one talks about:
We are in the exact center and the exact oldest part of the universe. Yes, it’s a quirk of relativity that we’d have to be. But the point is that when we look 3.6 billion light years away, we’re seeing a universe that is EVEN NOW billions of years YOUNGER.
I don’t mean that’s because it took light 3.6 billion years to get here. I mean that as an effect of temporal distortion of high-speed travel, there’s been less time for stuff to happen.
Years ago, I calculated the Drake equation and estimated less than 10^1 (in other words, less than ten) worlds with intelligent life in the universe. I had badly underestimated the number of planets in a typical galaxy, but I also badly overestimated the likely habitability of life on a given planet.
It's throwing out radiation like crazy. Why shouldn't we be able to detect that radiation? It's not the size of the source that matters.
I know they can "see" the ball of gas it's emitting, but when they specifically mention the size, it does matter.
It’s been many years now since I took my last astronomy class, so it escapes me how they do it, but astronomers don’t have to directly image an object to tell (in every instance) how large it is. Very ingenious indirect methods exist that allow them to make that determination for certain objects.
Correction: I wasn’t using the Drake equation as Drake wrote it. The original Drake equation calculated intelligent life in the galaxy. What I did added terms for the number of galaxies in the universe, a number billions of times greater than the actual Drake equation.
“If there is one every hundred years (on average) in a galaxy the size of the Milky Way, that’s a million every hundred million years, easily enough to suppress evolution and keep organisms at the single-cell level.”
Nah, because the average supernova would not emit enough radiation to “sterilize” an entire galaxy. I’m not sure even the largest ones imaginable could put out that much radiation, because galaxies are very large and electromagnetic radiation disperses by the inverse square law like any other radiation, so the density of the radiation drops drastically with distance from the source.
We of course have prima facie evidence of this, because we’re sitting her alive and communicating right now. So no galaxy-wide deadly supernova events could have possibly happened in the span of human history, or in the span of history of life on earth for that matter.
Even though they have to “look” through a ball of energy that is “radiating the energy of hundreds of billions of suns?”
"We" won't see anything unless it has already happened and that...about 600 years ago.
And, I thought Betelgeuse was in its death throes much the same as our Sun will be at the end. A white/yellow average sun that has expanded to a red giant. I'm not certain what the history of BG is.
Exactly. No one's claiming a single supernova sterilizes the entire galaxy. But a million of them could make a huge dent in life in the galaxy. And every hundred million years, another million of them have another go at it.
You are correct. However not all Radiation is light.
In a Supernova a number of nuclear reactions occur that emit things like neutrons, protons and alpha particles. These types of radiation do not travel through a vacuum at the speed of light.
Also Supernova do not happen all at once. It is a process that happens over a period of time (days).
“Exactly. No one’s claiming a single supernova sterilizes the entire galaxy”
Then what is the point of saying one happens every hundred years? It doesn’t matter how often they happen if they only affect a limited area of local space around them. There will still be thousands and thousands of star systems completely unaffected every time there is a supernova.
Plus, the same “prima facie” evidence applies even if you try to make the argument that the aggregate effect of multiple supernovas over millions of years could sterilize a galaxy. We’re still here, so we know that didn’t happen, in the entire history of life on earth.
“There is NO WAY they can see a 10-mile object from “billions of light years” away.”
Sure there is, if the object is radiating massive amounts of photons or something else we can detect. The size of the object itself is actually insignificant compared to the amount of radiation it is putting out, since it’s the radiation we detect directly.
There’s your fix to the Federal Debt and entitlement programs.
Aren’t gravitational waves involved in all these super luminous events? I can’t think of one where they are not at least suspected of being involved.
They're lunatics!☺
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