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.
Anything that powerful has got to throw out some pretty powerful gravitational waves, so I'd keep my eye peeled for any news out of LIGO.
Galactic Warming.
"Ho ho ho, Green Giant."
It takes a lot of skill and courage unknown, to catch the last wave and ride it in alone.
Need mo tax money to fund these research. We need to know what could kill us 3 billion years from now. They could be just 80 light years away!
Then "most astronomers" are nuts.
If,if is a big word, i believe all it is is just speculating,
yet they will be teaching it in society as fact.
Just the same way we got into this environmental crap.
“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.”
Well, in a practically infinite universe, there must be some parts that escape supernova effects long enough for intelligent life to evolve, if that is what actually happens. If some parts must escape, in a universe of this size, even if only a tiny fraction escapes, we should still see intelligent life all over the place. So they’re going to need to come up with a much better excuse to explain the paradox.
Yup. That’s going to be one big firecracker!
Which, by the time it reaches us, would make me, lessee, about 800 years old?
“especially if the initial radiation we see is gamma rays”
So we all turn into the Hulk. No biggie :)
Agreed.
I thought that looked like some interesting poetry, so I had to look it up... Little did I know it comes from THE WORST SONG EVER, lol!
Incidentally, forget what I said about LIGO. Turns out, LIGO was just coming online when this happened and may have missed it.
This is one of the reasons why I am doubtful of life in other places. 90% of all stars are in more densly packed areas that are peridically sterilized by supernovas.
Speed of light in vacuum is not a function of wavelength.
I like so-called worst songs.
We Built This City!
Those giant numbers are why I started loving astronomy 43 years ago.
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.
OK. I can understand that
At its heart is an object a little larger than 10 miles across.
I call BS here. There is NO WAY they can see a 10-mile object from "billions of light years" away.
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