I spend a lot of time in my upcoming book Death from the Skies! making the case that for the most part, astronomical dangers to life on Earth — especially from explosions called gamma-ray bursts — are incredibly rare, and not worth fretting over too much.
I may — may — have to change my mind.
Note: Let me be clear up front, since folks tend to worry about these things: I’m going to talk about some frightening things in this post, but my personal opinion as someone who has actually studied this stuff is that we are in no real danger. The object I’ll be describing is pretty interesting, but there are way too many uncertainties about it to cause any panic for now. So remain calm, keep your arms and legs inside the blog entry at all times, and enjoy. If you want more reassurance, just skip to my conclusion below.
Up until now, I hadn’t heard of WR 104. This is a binary star located 8000 light years away, more or less toward the center of our galaxy. The two stars are both whoppers; one is a massive O star, which will someday detonate in a tremendous supernova. However, at that great distance, it won’t do anything more than be a bright light in the sky.
The other star in the system is a bit of a worry, though. It’s what’s called a Wolf Rayet star, a massive, luminous star that is on the brink of exploding as well. In general, these also blow up as supernovae and, from 8000 light years away (80 quadrillion kilometers) it wouldn’t pose much of a threat.
But what if it explodes as a gamma-ray burst?
GRBs are a special type of supernova. When a very massive star explodes, the inner core collapses, forming a black hole, while the outer layers explode outwards. Due to a complex and fierce collusion of forces in the core, two beams of raw fury can erupt out of the star, mind-numbing in their power. Composed mostly of high-energy gamma rays, they can carry more energy in them than the Sun will put out in its entire lifetime. They are so energetic we can see them clear across the Universe, and having one too close would be bad.
Enter WR 104. The brighter of the two stars might, just maybe kinda possibly, be ready to go GRB on us. It’s not at all clear if it can, and there is reason to believe it can’t (young stars like this one tend to have characteristics that make it very hard for them to form an actual GRB). Also, even if it does blow up that way, the beams are a double-edged sword; yes, they pack an unbelievable punch, but they’re narrow. A GRB would have to be aimed precisely at us to damage us, and the odds of that are pretty low.
Except that for WR 104, it’s possible the star does have us in its sights.
The only way to know which direction a potential GRB’s beams will blast out is to look for some signs in the system of symmetry; a disk of gas, for example, would orbit the star’s equator, so the poles of that disk would be the direction the beams would follow. WR 104 does have a feature that allows us to determine its orientation — a vast spiral of material being ejected from the system.
The picture above was taken using the Keck infrared telescope in Hawaii. It shows the material being ejected. Both stars have strong winds of material they blow, like super-solar winds. These winds collide, and flow outward from the binary. The streaming gas forms a spiral pattern in the same way a rotating lawn sprinkler shoots out water. The gas doesn’t actually move along the spiral arms; that’s a bit of an illusion caused by the rotation of the system (comets sometimes show this same pattern).
University of Sydney astronomer Peter Tuthill, who has been studying WR 104 since it was discovered in 2000, has also created a dramatic movie showing the spiral pattern generated as the two stars orbit each other. The animation shown here is an older one — a newer one that is much cooler is available, but at 400kb I’ll simply link to it — but it gives you an idea of what’s going on.
The thing to note is that we really are looking at this spiral almost face-on, more-or-less down the pole of the system (it appears to be tilted by about 12 degrees from face-on, but it’s difficult to measure, and could be tilted by anything from 0 - 16 degrees — Tuthill’s technical paper has details). It’s hard to say exactly, but it’s close enough to make me wonder.
What would happen if WR 104 were to go all GRB on us?
One thing is that it would be incredibly bright. How bright is actually hard to say; GRBs are notoriously variable in brightness, and there may be quite a bit of dust between us and the system that would absorb a lot of the visible light. The major concerns from a GRB at this distance are two-fold: the impact of the high energy radiation, and the impact of subatomic particles called cosmic rays.
Models of a GRB exploding at roughly the same distance indicate that the immediate impacts are damage to the ozone layer, and the creation of nitrogen dioxide, which is basically smog. Gamma rays emitted by the burst would hit ozone molecules and shatter them, and models indicate that a GRB at this distance could deplete the ozone layer by 30% globally, with local pockets depleted by 50%. It would take years for the ozone to recover from that. Note that the ozone holes we have been dealing with the past few years are actually depletions of less than 5%. Obviously, this is a big deal.
Also, the gamma rays would break apart molecules of nitrogen in our air, which would reform as nitrogen dioxide, a reddish-brown gas that is essentially smog. This could potentially block sunlight, cooling the Earth. That may sound nice, given the reality of global warming, but in fact we’d rather not have something like this happen when we don’t understand all the implications. Plus, nitrogen dioxide is water soluble, and would precipitate down as acid rain.
So all that would be bad.
Worse, the flood of subatomic particles from such a GRB may in fact be more dangerous. These cosmic rays hit the air and create fast particles called muons, which would rain down over the Earth. How bad is that? Actually, it’s pretty uncertain; the number of variables involved is large, and the modeling of this is notoriously difficult. It’s not even clear that the cosmic rays from a GRB at this distance would even reach us, and if they did, what exactly would happen. The worst-case scenario is pretty bad — large scale mass extinctions — but I am not sure anyone really believes those models. The best case scenario is that they never reach us at all, so the range is a bit wide. 
There’s just too much we don’t know.
Another issue is that the distance to WR 104 is uncertain. It may be 8000 light years, but other astronomers think it may be as close as 5000 light years. That does make a difference, since the damage it can inflict is sensitive to distance. Farther away is better! Tuthill’s team thinks 8000 light years is a better estimate, so that’s good.
Finally, we don’t know when such a star will explode. It could be tonight, or it may be thousands of years from now. So it’s not worth losing sleep over this!
To wrap up: WR 104 is an interesting system. Both stars are guaranteed to explode one day. If they are just regular old supernovae, then we are in no danger at all, because they are way way too far away to hurt us (a regular supernova has to be about 25 light years or closer to hurt us, and WR 104 is 300 times farther away than that). It is possible that one of the stars may explode as a GRB, and it’s possible it’s aimed at us, but we don’t know. And we don’t know exactly what effects it would have on us. So if it’s less than 10,000 years from exploding and if it blows up as a GRB and if it’s aimed at us and if there isn’t much junk between us and it, then yeah, we may have a problem. But that’s an awful lot of ifs.
Given all these uncertainties, and having researched the dangers of GRBs extensively for my book, I won’t be losing any sleep over WR 104. For now, this is just an extraordinarily cool object, and it’s worth keeping an eye on — certainly for its astronomical interest alone! But as for it being a Death Star, I think it’s way way too early to tell.
Tip o’ the lead-lined beanie to The Daily Telegraph.
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:02 pm
AAAGGGHHHHH!!! We’re all gonna die! We’re all…
Uh… wait a minute…
We *are* all gonna die.
[Mal Reynolds look]
Huh.
[/Mal Reynolds look]
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:02 pm
And of course the thing that will keep me up at night is that it’s possible that it _already has_ exploded, and we just won’t notice until just before the GRB gets here.
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Interesting. Although, the odds of getting the Earth affected are really low. Is there any estimated percentage?
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Um, at the risk of outing myself as an idiot, how could it be that astronomers don’t know how far away WR 104 is?
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Aren’t supernovae supposed to be associated with all kinds of weird asymmetric “kicks” anyway, so there’s no guarantee the GRB jet will be aligned with the present rotation axis?
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Quick! Make a YouTube video before someone else does!
WR104.org anyone?
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:09 pm
“Um, at the risk of outing myself as an idiot, how could it be that astronomers don’t know how far away WR 104 is?”
Past a few lights years its much more difficult to measure the distance of stars because parallax can’t be used. Light intensity is used instead and is harder to draw out an estimate.
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:14 pm
stopgap is more or less correct. In this case, the brightness of the stars won’t help much, because the intrinsic brightness of stars in this stage is difficult to pin down.
The astronomers tried to use the measured speed of the winds from the stars compared to the actual expansion of the spiral arm. If it moves x arcsecdons per year, and you know the wind is moving at 1000 km/sec, then you can get a distance. The problem is the wind speed is very difficult to measure from the spectra. That’s why there’s some uncertainty.
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:16 pm
@stopgap,
Wow, that’s really interesting. I remember seeing Phil comment once that we aren’t really sure how far away the Andromeda galaxy is and since then, I’d been meaning to ask how that could be. A three thousand light year margin of error in a 3-8K LY distance estimate seems like an alarmingly high lack of certainty about our universe.
It’s funny how as a layman, I am usually so blissfully certain that the scientist types pretty much have everything figured out at this point about everything that I’m surprised when it turns out there’s a lot left to know…
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Peter - distances to objects are probably the single hardest thing to measure in astronomy (well, that and anything that depends directly on knowing the distance… for example, while it’s easy to measure how bright an object appears from the earth, you need to know its distance precisely to figure out its intrinsic luminosity - and in fact, because brightness falls off as distance squared, uncertainties in distance propogate into uncertainties about twice as large in luminosity!).
In the solar system, we can use radar ranging to get direct distances. For nearby stars, we can use parallax (shifting of nearby objects compared to background objects as we move around the sun), but it becomes more or less useless past 100pc. Aside from a few other funky geometrical methods (the moving cluster method is a nice one - if a cluster of stars are all moving in the same direction, they appear as if they’re all converging to a point in the sky whose position depends on how far away they are. There’s also a few edge-on maser disks in nearby galaxies that you can use to get geometric distances), most of the time you have to make assumptions about how intrinsically luminous an object is and then see how much dimmer it appears from earth.
In this case, the distance is actually geometric, so it doesn’t require that many assumptions, but as Phil says, the true wind velocity isn’t known very well.
[TMB]
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Someone’s going to say it sooner or later…
It’s already blown, it’s on the way, and it’ll be here on…
wait for it…
December 21, 2012!!!!!
(snork)
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:54 pm
So, let me get this straight.
What you’re actually saying is that we’re all in incredible danger and we better plan now? (by adopting the new religion/not washing the car/hiding/gathering in public areas/writing out congressman/blaming foreigners/what’d I leave out?).
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:59 pm
@Christopher
“December 21, 2012″
I was thinking the same thing. I think I’m going to write a book about how great the Mayan were at astronomy, far more advanced then historians give them credit (and sighting several examples from other “new age” writers). Then I’ll explain how they discovered gamma ray burst hundreds of years ago and that their observations showed that this doom was impending. They predicted the date, and now the BA has given the final evidence to show that this is possible, and therefore, my conclusion must be true. I’ll make a fortune, enough to be able to either disappear when Dec 22, 2012 roles around, or at least enough to hired someone to weasel me out of the jam.
Or maybe I’ll just go home and watch some more Doctor Who…
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Aren’t feeding black holes usually generate focused X rays out of the poles instead of gamma rays ?
Anyway lets hope we will not win this lottery!
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:59 pm
I assume that using a big mirror shield will be enough to deflect the GRB, right?
Right?
March 3rd, 2008 at 1:01 pm
TMB–didn’t Hipparcos direclty measure distances out to ~1k parsecs? Or am I being naive in thinking that measured distance ~ 1/angular resolution?
Anyhow, it looks like the planned Gaia mission (http://www.rssd.esa.int/index.php?project=GAIA&page=index) aims to measure a billion stars with 10’s of micro-arc-sec accuracy, which should at least tell us where WR 104 is. Damm, but we build cool spacecraft these days!
Does anyone have a reference to those studies about the effects on the ozone layer? I think the lifetime of stratospheric ozone is pretty short, so the system should return to equilibrium quickly after a shock…and besides, wouldn’t a gamma ray turn an ozone molecule into 3 O’s? Those should find O2’s to recombine with in seconds.
(And no, that’s not a denial that CFCs were a problem…CFC’s hang out in the stratosphere long enough to shift the equilbrium)
March 3rd, 2008 at 1:03 pm
As the Earth’s magnetic field weakens on its way to reversing, ordinary cosmic rays may become more and more of a hazard here on Earth, right? Imagine if WR104 happened to go GRB on us at the same time as our magnetic field was down!
Any idea what the duration of a GRB would be? If it happened to hit us, how long would we be bombarded with cosmic rays & gamma radiation? Seconds, days, decades?
March 3rd, 2008 at 1:12 pm
So apart from building a Dyson Sphere with a really thick shell, what are potential protections from GRBs?
March 3rd, 2008 at 1:17 pm
Incredibly nifty stuff.
Thanks for the explanation, Phil. And yeah, the idea that maybe it did go kaboom already and the stuff is on its way here is a bit unsettling, but what exactly can we do about it? It really is pretty nifty how things that far away could affect life clinging to a dinky little rock all the way over here.
March 3rd, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Questions:
1. Is there a spacetime “horizon” similar to the line of sight limited by the horizon at sea?
2. If it takes light a year to travel 1 lightyear (=9.463×10^17 meters), at 1 lightyear/year, how does the light ever reach us?
March 3rd, 2008 at 1:20 pm
And meant to add: I’m sure your new book mentions what, exactly, we could do about GRBs, and what it would take to do it and how effective it would be and how likely we would be to do such a thing. But if the burst was on the way and was scheduled to arrive next week… well, oh well.
March 3rd, 2008 at 1:43 pm
How long would the gamma ray stream last? I know typically, they can last anywhere from a few seconds to minutes, but what are the expectations here? Is this another major variable we have little understanding of? Also, what about the stream of cosmic rays, how long will those bombard us? Since they’re a product of the gamma rays generated, then would they last as long as the gamma rays? Furthermore, couldn’t we launch a flat piece of lead of some diameter at a heading towards the star spewing the rays? At least we could try to mitigate the problem by reducing the amount of exposure on earth. Solutions anyone?
March 3rd, 2008 at 1:44 pm
@Sean: Pretty much nothing. If we get to be SO DAMN UNLUCKY that we get with by a GRB, we’re pretty much hosed.
March 3rd, 2008 at 1:48 pm
@ drew terry
1. no space time horizon AFAIK not in the observable universe.
2. guess what, it reaches us by traveling the distance! ( surprise! )
Speed of Light is approx. 3×10^5 km/sec (300,000)
we see the objects as they were, when the light left the objects towards our way. By looking in the sky you see backwards in time (8000 years for those stars)
March 3rd, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Tuthill - the originator of this story - is just down the corridor from me.
March 3rd, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Since gamma rays travel at the speed of light, the main problem to any possible contingency/defence is that we wouldn’t know it was coming until the exact moment it hits us.
If we knew enough about stellar evolution to be able to precisely predict when the star would go supernova based on what we observe now, we could in theory know whether or not it has already blown if we knew the exact distance. Say it was 8000 light years away and we were able to determine from the light we observe that it was 5000y from blowing, then we’d know that it actually blew 3000y ago.
If we could figure the exact time the GRB would hit us it might be conceivably possible to put up some kind of shield in orbit and time it so that it would eclipse the GRB at exactly the right moment and block the beam from hitting the earth.
Not knowing the exact time, our only hope would be to erect some kind of orbital shield and keep it up indefinately (or at least for the several thousands to hundreds of thousands of years that we think it will take for the star to blow). I have no idea how much that would cost and it would also block out the sun, so it would do more harm than good.
March 3rd, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Here we are talking about a star in our galaxy, the assumed distance of which varies by more than 60%. Now consider that it gets much more difficult to measure the distance to objects the farther away they are and the distance just from our galaxy to the next is unfathomable (for me anyways).
My point? When you read articles about the data collected from observing gravitational lensing and even just far far away objects (outside our galaxy) how can scientist be so assertive about their interpretation of the data? I constantly read articles about how some team of astronomers discovered all this information about some early early galaxy. I’m assuming understanding the distance to the gravitational lense and to the subject behind it would be key to understanding what is being viewed via the gravitational lense.
Can anybody explain to me how they can be so sure, or if (I hope this is not the case) they are making more assumptions than they are letting on in the majority of their reports?
March 3rd, 2008 at 3:20 pm
The hobbits were right, we should live in holes in the ground.
Really, really deep holes.
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:13 pm
“Imagine if WR104 happened to go GRB on us at the same time as our magnetic field was down!”
Since gamma rays aren’t effected by magnetic fields, there would be no change.
Even a cosmic ray/muon event would be unlikely to effect the atmosphere as much as nuclear testing did on the 50’s.
And since the centre of the galaxy is in the Southern hemisphere, the northern hemisphere breadbaskets would largely be unaffected.
You’d give penguins sunburn. And maybe koalas. But the ozone layer down here is gone already.
So the biggest disruption would probably be the grounding of commercial airliners whenever Sagittarius is above the horizon. Think of the Woo that would generate.
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:20 pm
With regards to manyguns:
I may be in error on this, but I think that distance measures for distant galaxies can be more certain than those of stars in our own galaxy because we actually have more reliable methods of measuring distances for them. For example, we can use Type Ia supernova in those galaxies as standard candles with known luminosity so we can calculate the distance pretty precisely, or doppler shift in their spectra.
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:30 pm
I am assuming, since you didn’t mention it that the pair are not lined up with the orbit plane of the solar system. If it were/is would that give us a little better probabilty (however small) of protection by being behind the sun or one of the other (unlucky) planets?
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:41 pm
Apparently something like this has already happened. In the Ward/Brownlee book “Rare Earth” they mention SGR 1900+14 which went off on August 27, 1998. SGR as in Soft Gamma Repeater. Apparently this event was significant enough to lower the altitude of the earth’s night-time ionosphere from 90 km to 60 km and screw up satellite communications for all satellites on that side of the planet. The Ulysses spacecraft recorded a surge in gamma rays from the normal background of 200 counts per half-second to more than 100,000 counts per half-second. We think that SGR 1900+14 is located about 20,000 light-years away. Ward and Brownlee speculate about what would have happened if it was located 200 light-years away. The pulse would have been 10,000 times as strong (one billion counts per half-second) and possibly could have reached to the surface of the earth.
Now I must admit that this kind of stuff scares the crap out me. There is absolutely no warning at all and when the pulse arrives it reaches its maximum within a few seconds. Perhaps for a really close SGR all higher forms of life on the earth facing the source would receive a lethal dose of radiation. Humans, dogs, and cats would all be gone with only the cockroaches surviving. So roughly half the population would be wiped out within a few minutes. Not sure if the physics behind SGR’s is similar to GRB’s.
Anyway, here is a web site talking about SGR 1900+14:
http://solomon.as.utexas.edu/~duncan/magnetar.html#August_27
“On August 27, 1998 a giant flare from SGR 1900+14 set new records for the most intense flux of gamma-rays ever detected from a source outside our solar system. It blitzed gamma-ray and X-ray detectors on seven different spacecraft at locations throughout the solar system. Especially useful data were recorded by three experiments: the Russian Konus detector on the geo-space science Wind space probe which was orbiting near the Sun-Earth equilibrium point (”L1″), upstream of the Earth in the solar wind; the Italian-Dutch Beppo-SAX gamma-ray/X-ray observatory, in low Earth orbit; and a gamma-ray detector aboard the Ulysses spacecraft, a joint effort of the European Space Agency and NASA that was orbiting the Sun in a polar orbit at roughly the distance of Jupiter.
NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE), another Earth-orbiting X-ray observatory, was pointed away from SGR 1900+14 when the burst occured, but it nevertheless recorded a strong signal. High-energy photons were diffusing through the metal shields surrounding its X-ray detectors. However, one proven workhorse for SGR studies, the Burst and Transient Source Experiment (BATSE) aboard NASA’s orbiting Compton Gamma-ray Observatory, detected nothing. The BATSE team, led by mild-mannered Charles Meegan (who is BATSE-MAN) ran out of luck that day: the Compton Observatory was on the far side of the Earth at the time of the flare.
The flare hit the Earth on it’s night side, in the zenith over the western Pacific Ocean, at 1:22 A.M. Hawaii time. It was intense enough to strongly ionize the Earth’s outer atmosphere, affecting radio communications.”
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March 3rd, 2008 at 4:42 pm
I just learned about the wr104 in a newspaper. And i have some questions
1. how big are the chances that this will happen in our lifetime? any percent estimates?
2. With the technology we have today, is it not possible to know if it hits us before it actually hits?
question number 1 is the most important.
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:45 pm
@LabLamming:
I know the magnetic field doesn’t do squat against gamma rays (photons have no charge), but it does plenty to divert charged cosmic rays.
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Question about parallax:
Would putting the parallax-measuring satellite around Jupiter instead of Earth give a 5-fold improvement in resolution? ’cause, you know, the bigger orbit.
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:58 pm
B.A. wrote:
[quote]GRBs are a special type of supernova.[/quote]
Waaaaaaait a minute … I thought that if it produced a Gamma-Ray Burst (as a result of its core collapsing into a black hole), we called it a [b]hyper[/b]nova.
March 3rd, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Jackie:
1) Dunno. Pretty tiny I would think.
2) Gamma rays travel at the speed of light. Information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. So the earliest we could know about it is when it is here.
March 3rd, 2008 at 6:28 pm
If the two stars are in a orbit with an 8 month period, is it still possible that one of them is spinning rapidly? Do stars gravitationally lock?
March 3rd, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Okay, now that I own…
WR104GOESGRB.COM
WR104GRB.COM
WR-104.COM (WR104 was taken)
…Can anyone think of something cool to do with any of them? And, yes, I know how geeky it was to grab these domains, but I couldn’t resist.
March 3rd, 2008 at 8:38 pm
SO, it MAY be pointing close enough to us to make a problem, if it has already gone poof and the gamma ray burst is nearly here however,,,how long before it’s pointed too far off our axis to do us any harm? 10years? 20? When everything is in motion, the probability that we’ll have a direct hit is nearly,,,what,,,infinitesimal???
GAry 7
March 3rd, 2008 at 9:16 pm
LabLemming: Yes! I know people have discussed it before and I’m not sure why it’s never progressed anywhere. I suspect the cost ends up being too high, but I’m not sure.
tomr: The distance error is 1/error-in-position, but the error in position depends both on the angular resolution of the telescope and the brightness of the star. More distant stars are most often fainter, so the relative distance error actually rises more dramatically with distance than you’d naively expect. So there are some stars with good parallax distances beyond 100pc, but not that many. Gaia will definitely help!!
Manyguns: A couple of points. The first point, as asknot says, is that galaxies are large conglomerations of many objects, and that means there are generally more methods that you can use to try to measure their distances. If you can resolve individual stars (which is possible for about the nearest 20Mpc), you can use methods that work for individual stars, but you can also hope that there’s a supernova, use aggregate properties like how fast the galaxy spins, or for distant enough galaxies measure how fast they’re receding.
The other point is that it turns out that it’s much much easier to measure relative distances than absolute distances. Getting relative distances of galaxies to 5% is usually not too hard, but getting absolute distances of galaxies to much better than 10% is cutting edge. When you’re trying to understand the relative relationships between objects, the relative distances often matter more. For example, in the case of gravitational lensing, that you mention, there’s a very straightforward relationship between the relative source-lens distance and the probability of lensing, that doesn’t depend at all on how far the lens is from us (ie. when you see a gravitational lens event, most likely the source is twice as far from us as the lens).
[TMB]
March 3rd, 2008 at 9:21 pm
If it’s 5000 light-years away, won’t the GRB take at least 5000 years until it reaches us?
March 3rd, 2008 at 10:53 pm
Hello there!
I’ve heard the norwegian astronomer, Knut Jørgen Ødegaard talk about these kind of stars, and yes supernovas isn’t especially dangerous for us if they are not less than 25 light years away. But he says that stars like this, we have to be more than 2 million light years away to be “safe”, thats a lot more than 8000 light years.
One thing; could the star already have exploded 7999 years ago? I thought we would been dead already then since I suppose such a gamma ray thing will travel much much faster than the light.
For my last question; can the sun save us? Lets say the sun is between us and the death star, will that help at all?
March 4th, 2008 at 2:01 am
Preben, even a gamma ray can ‘t travel faster than visible light as a gamma ray, like visible light, is also part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The only difference is that gamma rays are at the extreme high energy, extreme low frequency end of the spectrum beyond X-Rays.
March 4th, 2008 at 2:23 am
Nothing travels faster than light. Never heard of Einstein’s relativity?
March 4th, 2008 at 2:39 am
I would think that the “if” which is most likely to save our planet in this particular case, is the angle at which we are situated relative to the pole of this system.
I mean: If your aim is off by 1 degree and you have the firepower and patience to fire at something from 8000 light years away, you’re going to miss by a pretty wide margin.
These gamma rays are pretty focused, right?
March 4th, 2008 at 2:42 am
Psychman! Way to go, maybe the BA has some great ideas as to what to do with those domains!
jeffersonian: you left out blaming the Jews! It must be their fault, right?? (I’m totally joking!!!)
March 4th, 2008 at 2:56 am
It would really be interesting to know how focused such gamma rays would be. If the rays aren’t dispersed at all I would guess that even such a slight angle-offset as 0.00001 degrees would cause the ray to miss the earth by as much as 4 000 000 km (if my calculations are right)
[MissDistanceInKm] = [DistanceOfLightYear]*8000*(1-Cos([AngleOffset]))
March 4th, 2008 at 3:04 am
[…] fra Kritt-Tertiær-utdøingen, der den kosmiske årsaken (en asteroide) er grundig dokumentert. Bad Astronomy Blog har en god oppsummering av den astronomiske siden av saken: It is possible that one of the stars […]
March 4th, 2008 at 3:10 am
“GRBs are a special type of supernova.”
Apart from SN1998bw, I’ve never heard of a concrete connection. Are all GRB’s now considored SNs? Could you please link a paper that shows this?
March 4th, 2008 at 3:22 am
So many responses and not one word about all the superpowers we’d get from the gamma rays.
March 4th, 2008 at 4:04 am
One question: Won’t this even if not directed at us effect our solarsystem so that it might move out of it’s regular orbit?
March 4th, 2008 at 5:30 am
Wouldn’t we be able to prevent this if we buy enough interstellar gamma quotas?
March 4th, 2008 at 5:57 am
[…] I was pretty impressed. Yesterday i borrowed another disc and ran intwww.xpmediacentre.com.auWR 104: A nearby gamma-ray burst? I spend a lot of time in my upcoming book Death from the Skies! making the case that for the most […]
March 4th, 2008 at 6:09 am
Manyguns: what it comes down to is that some objects are easier to figure out distances to than others. There are “standard candles” which have known luminosities, which you find out from measuring the distances to nearby ones by parallax measurements.
Unfortunately WR 104 is not one of these standard candles: Wolf-Rayet stars are unstable and rapidly evolving. Furthermore the system is too far to measure distance directly by parallax measurements.
March 4th, 2008 at 6:42 am
How does Cerenkov radiation reconcile with relativity?
March 4th, 2008 at 7:31 am
Sean O’Hara posts:
[[So apart from building a Dyson Sphere with a really thick shell, what are potential protections from GRBs?]]
Not sure about how to protect ourselves from GRBs, but I wanted to note that Dyson Spheres are not supposed to be solid shells. They are clouds of orbiting space platforms. You can’t really have a hollow spherical shell that size. Gravity tends to make really large objects try to get spherical. A solid Dyson shell would break up into tiny fragments.
March 4th, 2008 at 8:48 am
[…] an excerpt from an article Phil Plait wrote about WR 104 in his excellent blog BadAstronomy.com. Phil goes on to say that […]
March 4th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
H.Wolfe: There’s also unambiguosly GRB 030329A/SN 2003dh (Hjorth et al. 2003), GRB 031203/SN 2003lw (Malesani et al. 2004), and GRB060218/SN 2006aj (Cobb et al. 2006). I’d say that the association of long-duration GRBs with Ic supernovae is fairly concrete. The jury’s definitely still out on short-duration GRBs, though.
[TMB]
March 4th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
To Zeke:
Relativity describes the speed of light in a vacuum as constant. It travels slower through other mediums. Cerenkov radiation deals with particles traveling through a medium (ie water) faster the the speed of light in that medium. This is possible under the theory of relativity.
March 4th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
can we use the energy?
March 4th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
So with all those gamma rays and cosmic rays, have scientists determined whether or not I’ll be the Hulk or the Thing?
March 4th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
In discussing distance of objects lets not forget the possibility of a gravitational lens which can distort all the factors used to determine distance.
March 4th, 2008 at 8:41 pm
I have some questions…
How will our motion around the galaxy, relative to where this star system is, change our perspective on these binary stars?
If we are “looking down” on it now, will our position in the galaxy change with time sufficiently to reduce the impact?
How does the GRB dispurse over distance?
At 8000ly, what is the area covered by the cone vs 8, 80 and 800ly?
(Note that over a long enough period of time, the appearance of constellations in the sky that we see every night will change.)
March 4th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
I asked this in the “most likely supernova star” thread but I’ll ask again here if I may :
1) Have any supernovas actually been confirmed or observed as being produced or comingfrom Wolf-Rayet stars or is this only stellar theory?
2) Could the nearby binary stars Procyon or Sirius produce a type Ia (”white dwarf”) supernova - each is abright, relatiely againg star plus a white dwarf so the ingrediants are there for mass exhange & cataclysmic eruptions aren’t there? *
&
3) If so when .. Prcoyon is 11 ly off & already evolving into a sub-giant star.
Is Procyon b ultimately more of a threat than WR_104 given afew hundred million years?
Sorry if this has already been covered on the other “supernova” BA feedblitz-thingy thread - afraid I haven’t checked yet..
——————–
* A scenario - using the “Pup” Sirius B as the exploder - explored in a rather good if now dated (millennium 200-based) Sf novel ‘Supernova’ by Roger MacBride Allen & Eric Kotani. (Avon books, 1991.)
March 4th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
Is it really the case that any burst is guaranteed to be perpendicular to the plane of the spiral?
March 4th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
What if it already exploded 7999 years ago? Put our heads between our legs and kiss it all goodbye?
March 5th, 2008 at 1:28 am
This gamma-ray and particle beam - how narrow/focused is such a beast in terms of degrees?
March 5th, 2008 at 3:07 am
[…] but I just wanted to add a nice dose of apocalyptic dread to your afternoon. You are welcome! [Bad Astronomy via […]
March 5th, 2008 at 3:29 am
Christian:
Apparently such GRB cones can have a dispersion which is anywhere between 2 and 20 degrees (according to wikipedia) [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_ray_burst ].
If our angle of observation of this system off by 0-16 degrees (as suggested), then I guess it means that there is a distinct probability (I would guess > ~20%) that Earth would be struck by a hypothetical GRB emanating from WR 104. However, I would guess that it would also have to be taken into consideration that, if we are hit by a cone which is very dispersed, then the impact of the strike would also be significantly smaller than if we are hit by a very focused GRB.
Let’s just hope that there isn’t going to be any GRB coming from this thing.
March 5th, 2008 at 8:50 am
[…] but I just wanted to add a nice dose of apocalyptic dread to your afternoon. You are welcome! [Bad Astronomy via […]
March 5th, 2008 at 8:55 am
Dang it you all just ruined the ending of “Lost” for me.
March 5th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
I think it’s gonna be really hard for it to hit us because we’re still all revolving around the sun and everything IS still always moving. Hehehe unless it’s one of our astrophysicists then it will have to somehow track our every movement like a guided rocket or something.
March 5th, 2008 at 7:35 pm
I’m going to have to go with the theory that the Mayan’s predicted this and this is the reason we will all die December 21, 2012. That would be the coolest day to have a birthday on. Everybody would blame you for the apocalypse. Although the chances are really slim that we would get hit. But then again, there’s still a chance.
March 6th, 2008 at 9:47 am
StevoR posts:
[[2) Could the nearby binary stars Procyon or Sirius produce a type Ia (”white dwarf”) supernova - each is abright, relatiely againg star plus a white dwarf so the ingrediants are there for mass exhange & cataclysmic eruptions aren’t there? * ]]
No. They are separated from one another by many AUs. For a type IA supernova you need a close binary.
[[3) If so when .. Prcoyon is 11 ly off & already evolving into a sub-giant star.
Is Procyon b ultimately more of a threat than WR_104 given afew hundred million years? ]]
No. Procyon A doesn’t have enough mass to go supernova. It’s only about 1.75 Solar masses, and I think you need at least 3-8, somewhere in that range.
March 6th, 2008 at 9:49 am
Oh, and Procyon and the Sun have signficantly different galactic orbits. By the time Procyon is a red giant, we may be nowhere near it. In general the present close-by stars are not the close-by stars we had 100 million years ago or will have 100 million years from now.
March 6th, 2008 at 11:30 am
How soon is it gonna happen ? I mean the gamma ray attack to Earth. When it will reach to the Earth ? After how many years ?
March 6th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Just a sci-fi sort of thought regarding warning time … how long does it take that GRB beam, which would form in the collapsing core, to exit the WR star? My guess is the neutrinos would get here first, but by how much?
I seem to recall that the visible light SN1987A arrived here a few hours later than the neutrinos did.
March 6th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Most interesting to me would be discussion comparing the estimates of the interval between current obsevation and the GRB event and the rate of shift of WR104’s relative polar axis
March 6th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
This is one of the reasons I like this site: something 8000 light years away gest filed under “local news”.
March 7th, 2008 at 4:19 am
A great article about this marvellous phenomenon
Thanks!
March 8th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Seems like a slim if any chance to me, depending on the width of the beam. Look at it this way, unless the “beam” is 186 Million miles wide, and also “centred” on the Sun we are in the clear.
If the beam aint 186 Million miles wide then even if it’s headed for our solar system our rotation around the Sun makes us a moving target, giving us {even if the burst lasts for 24 hours} 364 “safe” places to be in our orbit around the Sun per year.
So if you add this to the odds of it even pointing in our direction then I think you’ll see that we have little if anything to be concerned about.
Canada Bob.
March 8th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
The beam is actually several light years wide by the time it gets here from 8000 ly away.
March 9th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Right then, time to put me tin hat back on…
Then again, if we are looking at WR 104 as it was {pointing} approx 8000 years ago, won’t we have moved out of it’s target zone now ?
Canada Bob.
March 9th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
[…] [Via badastronomy.com] […]
March 13th, 2008 at 1:42 am
In your oppinion,how do you think,will we survive until our childs get grown?:) write me an e-mail
March 14th, 2008 at 5:36 am
Our local cloud is nore dangerous than WR 104.
March 21st, 2008 at 7:46 am
i read sometime ago an article in either new dawn or nexus about gamma burst rays and possibly dissappearing stars, the author noted patterns of GRBs being ‘fired’ and stars dissappearing in such exchanges. was pretty freaky and made sense as much as I could ascertain and certainly if this pre-grb entity is being angled onto us like some cosmic artillery canon then maybe we should all think twice about all the green lasers we are pointing into the skies at night. Often I have wondered that I would be on the recieving end of a grb after pointing my 100mw green laser at a star and ‘tickling’ it to see if it would respond:)
March 21st, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Because of the nature of the WR104 GRB Event, i.e. unpredictable from Earth before the fact, and its location - ‘dead on’, as it were, between Earth and the galactic central core (pardon the pun), it would indicate that the Mayans had to have *been told* about the certainty of an event *that had already occured*, in making their prediction for 12/21/2012. Predicting the arrival date of the GRB wave front at Earth is easy if you’ve already been to WR104 and watched it explode.
If the Mayans were the only source for that End Date, it would be easier to dismiss, but the same doomsday date suddenly appears in the records of the ancient Chinese, and Hindus, and Egyptians, and Sumerians, and Maiori, and Hopi, and Celts, (and so on) - and *all at the same time, 3,500 years ago*.
Its as if someone visited the Earth, and made a deliberate effort to seed that information into cultures around the world, as a warning, which they hoped would endure through history - at least somewhere - until the present day. The fact that the date equivalent to December 21, 2012 is *literally carved in stone* in various representations by a dozen ancient unrelated cultures distributed around the planet is worth paying attention to.
The Mayan frescoe reproduced at the end of the Dresden Codex shows a goddess pouring water upon the Earth to scourge the “evil” from below. The NOx acid rain described above, or, indeed, the gamma/cosmic ray particle bombardment from the heavens itself would seem to fulfill that description.
Of course, there is also Solar Max in 2012 (peak solar flare and sunspot activity), Earth’s diminishing magnetic field (indicative of impending geomagnetic Pole Shift), and the newly increasing frequency of the Shumann Resonance to make us wonder, as well, among other things….
e) All of the Above
March 22nd, 2008 at 11:32 am
According to Ritz’s balistic relativity theory (source velocity added to velocity of light) the axis of the GRB “swords” would be in the orbital plane of the binary that produces the GRBs and the sword’s sharp edges would be perpendicular to the orbital plane.
If this is true, then WR104 should not pose a threat to us.
Please see:
Ritzian Gamma-Ray Bursts
http://www.datasync.com/~rsf1/grbs.htm
March 29th, 2008 at 1:41 am
[…] http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2008/03/03/wr-104-a-nearby-gamma-ray-burst/ […]
March 29th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
# The Bad Astronomeron 08 Mar 2008 at 4:22 pm
The beam is actually several light years wide by the time it gets here from 8000 ly away.
Wouldn’t this tend to weaken the beam considerably by spreading out the Gamma Rays?
March 29th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
I just heard about this star this morning on Coast to Coast with Art Bell (I just listen on occasion for a good chuckle — honest!).
Anyway, this story is particularly interesting to me, since I had a dream about 2 years ago that I think depicted such an event quite accurately. There are personal/spiritual aspects to the dream that I will not share, so you get the watered down version:
I found myself standing on a white, sandy beach. I looked around at all the people frolicking joyfully on the beach. There was something very serene and surreal feeling about the entire scene… there was a golden-yellow hue cast all around.
I heard a voice tell me to leave the beach immediately and go directly to a nearby fallout-type shelter, because “the earth would soon burn with fervent heat”. Once inside the shelter, I was able to look out over the beach through a narrow horizontal opening. The space inside the shelter was small, but the shelter itself seemed quite massive… with walls at least 3 feet thick, and a roof of concrete and lead(?) a dozen or more feet thick. As I entered the shelter and peered out the opening, immediately the landscape turned brighter. It was deathly silent. Everyone on the beach stopped and, shading their eyes, looked skyward. Everyone started screaming in pain. A few yard from the shelter a man stumbled by, staring wide-eyed at the skin on his arms, which, only a few seconds after the bright light appeared, was now bright red and blistering up right before my eyes. He was being microwaved alive! He didn’t immediately die, but stumbled out of view. And then the light faded…
Didn’t mean to paint such a grisly picture… but the dream made a huge impact on me… it was oh-so-real. So when I heard about this star it just made me wonder.
…FWIW
March 30th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
[…] To find out more about WR 104 click here. […]
March 31st, 2008 at 10:15 pm
Just a question. If it explodes will it take 5000 to 8000 years to get here ?
April 3rd, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Well so much for listening to these left-wing crazies from the “Church of Al Gore” that we are all going to die from “Global-Scamming”….One thing about earth…if and when the gamma rays do strike and if it is a direct hit all life will fry in a second or two…is that eventually life will start all over again and hopefully this time we will do it without the left-wing screw-pots who have made this one so maddening!
We are not the first civilization or life to inhabit earth…and we surely will not be the last!
LET THE LIGHT SHINE BABY!
April 5th, 2008 at 10:10 am
[…]
External links
* WR 104: A nearby gamma-ray burst? http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2008/03/03/wr-104-a-nearby-gamma-ray-burst/
Smile, you’re on wikipedia!
April 5th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
Yep, and here’s the correct link to it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WR_104
April 9th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
I am personally not worried, but…
John, et al who asked-
Yes. It will take 5000-800 years for the GRB to get here.
The point is, that if the anniversary of the event is 8000 years ago tomorrow the ray burst will arrive tomorrow.
So, eat drink and be merry, however…
FRT- The nobel-prize winning scientific community is universal in its agreement that global warming is not a scam. By your reasoning, since the death of my son is ultimately inevitable, I shouldn’t bother bringing him to the doctor when he is sick.
Deep 6
April 15th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
to all those who are wondering that if a GRB did happen, it would be here in about 10 seconds to a minute. so no need to stay awake at night waiting for it to come. when it happens, we wont even know what hit us. oh, and about 12-21-12 a guy already made a book about it.
April 23rd, 2008 at 1:36 am
Wow, I think I just saw you on Sci-Fi Channel’s “Countdown to Doomsday.” That was interesting, although it was kinda dissapointing when the guy said that we may want to create an arc to bring us back. Um… that’s a good idea, but also kinda cheap way out. Let’s actually try protecting the planet instead of playing zombie species. lol
May 8th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
[…] from the skies. Impact by asteroids and comets, radiations from the Sun, stars exploding nearby, gamma rays burst, cosmic rays […]
May 14th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
I am personally excited at the possibilities of impact and punishment like any good Christian. When hearing of pinball wizards, giant comets or killer asteroids, one can not but await and pray for the best choice in order to finish this world. Isn’t our main religion about waiting for the horrible day, the day of the rage of the Lord? We have been reared to wait and see. And it’s not only our religion, on further inspection. In the words of a Chinese philosopher: waiting is not waiting. http://lulu.com/astrology
Today I was nested and hooked to NASA’s announcement when just a supernova remnant was announced. Japanese scientists at least theoretically find new planets. We should have more Nibiroids in the sky, speed up KELU-1 and manipulate the media, so perhaps that policemen shall drop the gun and swords become plows, perhaps. On the other hand there is no reason to drop a gun at all, since the fun begins with Armageddon.
May 15th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
Wow… you sure sell on crazy. Good job!
May 16th, 2008 at 2:30 am
Is this Klaudio guy for real?!
June 12th, 2008 at 10:24 am
I’m a layman when it comes to this stuff, but it is interesting.
If I understand correctly WR104 or WR140 which MSN news incorrectly refered to it as is @8000 ly away that means we are looking at an object that was in this location in our sky 8000 years ago. Where the heck is it now if it’s moving? Is it moving along side us or passing us in the fast lane, moving to or from us. How can someone get even close at predicting a possible bombardment if they can’t tell us where it is now?
June 12th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Good point. lol Score one for the layman.
June 18th, 2008 at 4:01 am
A human(e) technological civilisation which occupies a sphere of >2-3 thousand light years will be immune from extinction by GRBs, just as an interplanetary civilisation will be immune from catastrophic climate change, major asteroid/somet impacts , or supervolcanos.
A civilisation confined to the surface of one planet is, we now know, unsustainable, however “Green” we make it. It would, in any case, most likely be totalitarian and, ergo, NOT human(e).
WE have a logical path ahead of us, if we care to take it:-
1/ space tourism leads to cheap access top Space ( 15-30 years)
2/ lunar bases ( already foreseen by several Governemnts in Asia as well as the West) lead to Solar Power satellites and end of energy shortages ( 30-50 years). Access to vast ET resources follows shortly.
3/ Interplanetary civilisation evolves around Sol leading to O’Neill style dispersed city states/small nations ( 200-500 years).
4/ solar sails demonstated in orbit- 2010-1014- the Planetary Society
5/ solar sails built in Space’+ banks of solar powered lasers set up inside the orbit of Mercury., to support interstellar exploration with solar sail driven probes( 100-200 years)
6/ O’Neill Islands fitted with solar sails and sent ,. on the slow route , to nearer stars( launch 500 years arrive 1500 years).
7/ O’Neill colonists use “local” asteroids and comets to set up daugheter civilisations and prepare new colonies to migrete onwards
8/ An expanding sphere of human and posthuman societies occupy a sphere of 2-3 thousand light years’ radius, immune from GRB extinction( 5 million years)
9/ If new physics, eg fusion or anti matter propulsion , are developed, phase 8 is reached in c 500,000 years
10/ Hominid evolution proceeds and, in time, the Galaxy as a whole becomes a thinking, self-reflecting entity ( many millions of years)
The above is a possible future; the others are
1/neoMalthusian collapse , or
2/a new totalitarian “civilisation” based on the ascendancy of Green Global warming theory and anti-human philosophy. This will of course collapse impotently before natural forces which a simplified Green culture will be powerless to transcend ( hurrah, say the misanthropes).
For us, the main lesson is to learn to regard Space exploration and development not as frivolous luxuries and waste, but as essential life insurance for our descendants!
July 26th, 2008 at 4:44 am
Further study of the Wolf-Rayet systems will show that these objects each have a cycle. Early WR to Late WR. How fast each goes through the WR phase is likely a product of the mass of the star. In this case there has been some mass loss to the companion star as well as the mass loss indicative of very massive objects. Many begin as massive hot O stars and evolve in a few million years to Luminous Blue Variable stars (LBV’s / see Eta Carinae) before moving into the WR stages. There is very good evidence that this is in fact the path. Under some circumstances the stars may be too massive and so unstable that they supernova before they reach the WR stage, (my guess for Eta Carinae) but WR104 looks to have a low enough mass threshold and will continue through the WR phases. Until there is decidedly more information and study of the WR systems and how binary systems interact we can’t know how far WR104 has progressed. Being that this is a young system I would lean heavily toward WR104 not being an issue for many thousands of years regardless of it’s axis.
September 10th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
Fear not, my children.
September 13th, 2008 at 6:23 am
With the close proximity of a Gamma Ray burst, being within 6 to 8000 light years away, the black hole remaining, can finally give us the information we need to understand how we can be able to explain what lays beyond the space time fabric. The first man to figure out how to use this energy from the black hole will send us to the classification #1 civilization. We need hypothetical formula’s now on how to harness and channel that energy from macro to nano for space travel. Please hurry because I really hate not even being a #1 classification civilization. Infinite possibilities.I am personally classified as a -3 classification as you can probably tell, so I need you smart guys to help me out.
October 31st, 2008 at 3:19 pm
It’s a great read but…
What you have measured is the axis about which the 2 stars rotate around each other, not the actual axis of rotation of the WR star itself.
The 2 are not neccessarily aligned.
December 5th, 2008 at 11:51 pm
Many months ago - March 6th, 2008 at 9:47 am - a long time esp. in the net-world; Barton Paul Levenson kindly replied & answered my question :
“StevoR posts:
[[2) Could the nearby binary stars Procyon or Sirius produce a type Ia (”white dwarf”) supernova - each is abright, relatiely againg star plus a white dwarf so the ingrediants are there for mass exhange & cataclysmic eruptions aren’t there? * ]]
No. They are separated from one another by many AUs. For a type IA supernova you need a close binary.
[[3) If so when .. Prcoyon is 11 ly off & already evolving into a sub-giant star.
Is Procyon b ultimately more of a threat than WR_104 given afew hundred million years? ]]
No. Procyon A doesn’t have enough mass to go supernova. It’s only about 1.75 Solar masses, and I think you need at least 3-8, somewhere in that range.”
& Barton Paul Levenson also wrote on March 6th, 2008 at 9:49 am :
“Oh, and Procyon and the Sun have signficantly different galactic orbits. By the time Procyon is a red giant, we may be nowhere near it. In general the present close-by stars are not the close-by stars we had 100 million years ago or will have 100 million years from now.”
Thanks BPL - belated but sincere!
Your answer is appreciated & I hope you’re able to see this post somehow.
Apologies for not responding *much* earlier but afraid events intervened …
PS. This thread is Wiki-linked to their entry on Wolf-Rayet 104. Neat.
(Not my doing, searching for info & found out.)
December 8th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
GRBs are isotropic which means that they are not directionally biased. It would be a random shot from WR104 if we get hit from a GRB.
Don’t Panic.
December 8th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
And Kelt, you got this misinformation from where exactly? Because it’s totally wrong. GRBs are beamed as I have said pretty clearly in this and about a dozen other posts.
January 5th, 2009 at 12:26 am
[…] Bad Astronomy: WR 104: A nearby gamma-ray burst? […]
January 5th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Should I use my special extra dark “solar eclipse” viewing sunglasses for the GRB or are my BlueBlockers good enough?
My retinas sure aren’t what they used to be.
January 10th, 2009 at 7:31 pm
If WR104 does in fact explode as a gamma ray burst and we take a direct hit from one of the beams, a lot of people and animals will absorb a lethal dose of radiation almost instantly, to say nothing of plant life and the havoc it would wreak upon the atmosphere. The damage it would do to life here would be severe, on the order of the asteroid impact and mega volcanic eruptions in present day India occurring at the same time which killed off the dinosaurs. But a Wolf-Rayet star is also very unstable and because of that they shed massive amounts of material back into space. As they shed material, angular momentum is also shed, and what is required for a gamma ray burst is a massive, rapidly rotating star. If the core is not spinning rapidly enough when it does become a black hole, no gamma ray burst takes place. it has to spin rapidly enough so magnetic fields in the material around the black hole can fire off relativistic jets long enough for them to blast through the star’s outer layers. A star that has it’s outer envelope of hydrogen and helium will not let the jets reach the surface with enough energy to produce a gamma ray burst, but a star devoid of that same envelope will allow the jets to fire off into space with their full intensity. If the hydrogen rich outer envelope is still present, an ordinary core-collapse supernova destroys the star and spares us. For a gamma ray burst to occur, it takes a set of circumstances that fortunately for us occur very rarely. and just being a massive star in and of itself does not make it a candidate to explode as a gamma ray burst.
January 10th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
Virgin Mary told us on message number 3.106.
January 8, 2009. Message from Our Lady of Peace, Anguera, Bahia , Brazil.
Dear Sons and Daughters, open your hearts and joyfully receive My appeals. I come from heaven in order to lead you to heaven. Be dócil. Don´t cross your arms. Make the effort to live your true role as christians. Humanity is heading towards a great suffering. God is calling you and is waiting for you with open arms. Pay attention. A GREAT LIGHT WILL BE VISIBLE IN THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE. IF PEOPLE ARE NOT CONVERTED, FIRE WILL FALL FROM HEAVEN AND A GREAT PART OF HUMANITY WILL BE DESTROYED. WHAT I HAVE SAID IN THE PAST WILL BE REALIZED. Bend your knees in prayer. Your victory is in The Lord. Forward. Hurry, and don´t back out.This is the message I transmit to you today in the name of The Most Holy Trinity. Thank you for permitting Me to reunite here once more. I bless you in the name of The Father, and of The Son, and of The Holy Spirit. Amen. Be at peace.
http://www.apelosurgentes.com.br/english
January 10th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
@Tony : & his message from the “Virgin Mary”
Given the “VirginMary” is “divine” & given our current age - unlike the Biblical one actually does, y’know know something about science couldn’t the “Virgin Mary” say something like :
Look at this particular star called Wolf-Rayet 104 its about to blow - in X days , months, years! Your astronomers have already measured the spin angle but its actually 0.0 degrees and coming right at you - for verification the next supernova (assuming it ain’t WR-104) will be taking place in the galaxy NGC whatebver whatever-whatever ..?
Now that’d be worth looking at!
Actually is WR-104 in the Southern hemisphere? I’m not sure. Maybe, it could be Eta Carinae instead -in which case a cryptic reference to the star of the keyhole and Homunculi could be semi-convincing evidence this phantasm knows what she’s (?) talking about …??
… Or, well now, evidence only that she read this specific post! Sigh.
Incidentally, at 7,500 light-years away and supernova by Eta Carinae would be awesome and not very dangerous. It would, however, be a superb start to the 2009 International Year of Astronomy!
January 10th, 2009 at 10:21 pm
&Bein’Silly :
“- for verification the next supernova (assuming it ain’t WR-104) will be taking place in the galaxy NGC whatebver whatever-whatever ..?”
Hey what’s wrong with a supernova going off in one of the Messier galaxies - M31 or M51 or the star burst galaxy M82?
Or hey, even one of the Magellanic Clouds?
(Hmm .. the Large one had its turn back in 1987 - its about time for the SMC to show us what it can do !
Their NOT all “New” General Catalogue galaxies you know!
January 11th, 2009 at 10:03 am
These are events that happen over a cosmic time scale. From a statistical standpoint, it is highly unlikely that such an event, even if it is imminent, would happen during our lifetimes, or even during the lifetime of the human race.
January 13th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Hmm lets’ see, if we can avoid gamma bursts, black holes, asteroid/comet impacts, earthquakes, volcanoes, sudden pole reversals/tilting, mega solar flares, galactic arm shock waves..and cancer, we still die anyway. Whew I feel better.
February 21st, 2009 at 5:23 am
I thought Dr Grant Hill had established the beam to miss the earth with as much as 40 degrees on the AAS meeting? I read 0.0 degrees here…
February 23rd, 2009 at 11:32 pm
Grant Hill’s paper is:
WR 104: Are We Looking Down The Gun Barrel of a Future GRB?
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting# 213,# 341.03, 2009.
A conclusion is that for WR 104 “the spectroscopy indicates a higher inclination than that of the imaging”.
March 2nd, 2009 at 6:39 am
the idea would be to find that which exceeds the speed of light (that which simultaneously destroys sub-atomic particles) and develop a detector so the returning data would “race” the gammas back to us - BUT - how much warning time would that really give us - anyhow ???
March 2nd, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Well,
In addition to the economy, our inevitable advancing age, the possibility of becoming ill, etc., now there’s WR 104. I say it’s time to break out the
prime rib,lobsters, fetuccine alfredo, calamari, lasagna, bolognese sauce, Arthur Avenue NYC bread, the best wines, cannoli, espresso, Sambuca,and hug those you love…… and as my mother used to say: “Whattaya gonna do?”
April 7th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
that is kinda scary… but less scary, overall, than say… what cholesterol might be doing to my arteries.
April 8th, 2009 at 3:00 am
[…] is, besides all the items below — here’s a little something to worry about. However, the Bad Astronomer weighed in on it about a year ago, and we’re all still […]