Thanks decimon. You remember how there used to be some asswipe who'd add "callingartbell" to the keywords in topics like this? I don't miss that at all.
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Posted on 10/07/2011 9:15:08 AM PDT by decimon
Space is a violent place. If a star explodes or black holes collide anywhere in our part of the Milky Way, they’d give off colossal blasts of lethal gamma-rays, X-rays and cosmic rays and it’s perfectly reasonable to expect Earth to be bathed in them. A new study of such events has yielded some new information about the potential effects of what are called “short-hard” interstellar radiation events.
Several studies in the past have demonstrated how longer high-energy radiation bursts, such as those caused by supernovae, and extreme solar flares can deplete stratospheric ozone, allowing the most powerful and damaging forms of ultraviolet radiation to penetrate to the Earth’s surface. The probability of an event intense enough to disrupt life on the land or in the oceans becomes large, if considered on geological timescales. So getting a handle on the rates and intensities of such events is important for efforts to connect them to extinctions in the fossil record.
“We find that a kind of gamma ray burst — a short gamma ray burst — is probably more significant than a longer gamma ray burst,” said astrophysicist Brian Thomas of Washburn University. Improved and accumulated data collected by the SWIFT satellite, which catches gamma ray bursts in action in other galaxies, is providing a better case for the power and threat of the short bursts to life on Earth.
The shorter bursts are really short: less than one second long. They are thought to be caused by the collision of two neutron stars or maybe even colliding black holes. No one is certain which. What is clear is that they are incredibly powerful events.
(Excerpt) Read more at geosociety.org ...
Burst of ping.
Bush’s fault!
Anything to end the Obama occupation of the White House.
I’ve always said, astrophysicists have entirely too much power!
Perhaps the genetic mutation that brought about The Great Leap Forward in humans was caused by a gamma ray burst. More likely two bursts. Half the people got the short one.
Ive read in the past that radiation from space and terrestrial sources has been the engine for both good and bad mutation of Earth’s life from the beginning
Well that covers the bases.
so long as the mutants stay in the sewers I’m ok with this
A graviton wave preceding a gamma ray burst 14,200 years ago had triggered the Vela and Crab supernova explosions, an event not recorded in history, but one that perhaps survives in oral tradition. Is this an account of mass radiation sickness followed by photochemical smog from ozone depletion?:
6 Wail, for the day of the LORD is near;
it will come like destruction from the Almighty.[a]
7 Because of this, all hands will go limp,
every heart will melt with fear.
8 Terror will seize them,
pain and anguish will grip them;
they will writhe like a woman in labor.
They will look aghast at each other,
their faces aflame.
9 See, the day of the LORD is coming
—a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger—
to make the land desolate
and destroy the sinners within it.
10 The stars of heaven and their constellations
will not show their light.
The rising sun will be darkened
and the moon will not give its light.
On a parallel path, the in the Mesoamerican myth of Tamoanchan was a paradise where the gods created the first of the present human race - a cave, which is probably the only place where a human could survive the radiation from an intense gamma ray burst.
It seems that everything gets compared to some biblical passage.
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No. I rarely look at keywords. as Satchel Paige might say, something might be annoying me.
That happens because of Isaiah 45:7. :’)
But it is mostly empty. I think that is why it is called "space".
| 1 × 10−27 kg/m3 | Very approximate density of the universe |
But then again an atom is more dense, so I guess it all evens out in the end.
1.1418822249239304929572734539251e+4 kg/m3 (at least that is what my Casio says)
But it is mostly empty.
Except for the snakes. I've seen the snakes.
Oh yeah, I forgot about those. And the worms. They left all those holes laying about. I guess that is why the string theory has so much traction.
Well, the universe is an interesting place. What with all of the dead/non-dead cats everywhere.
Yes, but it is "lumpy," which leave one to wonder what may be in the path of the sun as it orbits the galactic center and how that may cyclically effect our solar system "weather." Very little thought goes to this, it seems to me.
Mafiosi?
Is studying these kinds of events something our government should spend money on to warn us, or is this a place for a budget cut?
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