Comments on: Fermi at 2: still rocking the high-energy sky

By: Chris Winter

Chris Winter — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 00:18:47 +0000

Chris wrote (#2): “I always wondered if some of the gamma ray bursts we see are actually due to a distant alien war.”

I had the same thought, back before it was settled that GRBs are way distant, like millions of light years out.

I think it’s important to note that this post is not about bursters, but steady (AIUI) gamma-ray sources — at least steady on the time scale of years.

By: Infinite123Lifer

Infinite123Lifer — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 22:52:22 +0000

@katwagner

I was there when Mount St. Helen’s blew. It seems like a dreamy memory. Raining ash, ash and more ash. It was a crazy ash time, and a crazy ash memory.

@#5. 42

By: WJM

WJM — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 23:21:04 +0000

Am I the only one who says “gurb”?

By: Matthias

Matthias — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 19:17:51 +0000

There have been a lot of all sky surveys recently:
* Planck
* Wise
* Updated Fermi all sky map

Would be ideal candidates for chromoscope.net unfortunately they are not included (Wise, Fermi (only the old all sky map)) or only in low resolution (Planck).

By: Keith Bowden

Keith Bowden — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 17:48:11 +0000

“Space… is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space…”

By: katwagner

katwagner — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 17:18:08 +0000

I don’t think there’s a word in the dictionary that can describe how farking bad these GRBs are. I mean I got stuck in the Mount St. Helens ashcloud and I thought that was really big and bad.

By: Messier Tidy Upper

Messier Tidy Upper — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 15:28:56 +0000

@ ^ Chris : Given the staggeringly huge amount of energy* released in GRBs that would have to be some war indeed!

————-

* From the BA blog item linked to my name :

Let me put this in perspective for you. Imagine a one megaton nuclear weapon detonating. That’s roughly 50 times the explosive yield of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Devastating. The Sun, every second of every day of every year, gives off 100 billion times this much energy. That’s every second. A star is a terrifying object. In the few seconds that a gamma-ray burst lasts, it packs a million million million times that much energy into its beams. In other words, for those few ticks of a clock the GRB is sending out more energy than the Sun will in its entire lifetime. There is, quite simply, no way to exaggerate the devastation of a gamma-ray burst.
- Phil Plait, ‘Naked eye visible GRB!’ [GRB 080319B] posted online 2008 March 20th, 9:41 AM.

A Gamma Ray Burst can be described as “energetic” in much the same way that our universe is describable as “big” – inadequately!

PS. Perspective providing, hopefully :

“1 million seconds is about 12 days.One billion seconds is about 31 years.”
- Stephen Jones writing in the ‘Weekend Australian’ newspaper, 2011 April 9th-10th.

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 14:08:48 +0000

I always wondered if some of the gamma ray bursts we see are actually due to a distant alien war.

By: Messier Tidy Upper

Messier Tidy Upper — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 13:15:13 +0000

So now we’re getting a Fermi-er grasp of understanding the Gamma–ray sky and the objects that light it up?

Marvellous!

black holes are sloppy eaters.

Well sphaghetti(~fied stars & who knows what else) *is* one of the harder foods to eat cleanly.