BANG!!!!
- Thread starter Simon F
- Start date
We wouldn't even know what hit us... my god...At least we wouldn't see it coming.
Killer-Kris
Regular
K.I.L.E.R said:
I imagine it might range from radiation poisoning to possibly being just plane old cooked.
Somehow I feel "BANG!!!!", even with all caps and four exclamation marks, isn't quite sufficient as a headline to describe an event of this magnitude...
I wonder, would people and other organisms on the far side of the Earth be able to survive such an event? Of course the sudden and catastrophic loss of life on the exposed side of the planet would play havoc with the ecosystem, but perhaps we would be able to re-seed the lands eventually.
Unless of course the energy would boil away a major part of our atmosphere... That'd be like, a major bummer.
Anyway, it's curious how a neutron star could have a magnetic field at all, as neutrons are supposed to be... Well, neutral.
I wonder, would people and other organisms on the far side of the Earth be able to survive such an event? Of course the sudden and catastrophic loss of life on the exposed side of the planet would play havoc with the ecosystem, but perhaps we would be able to re-seed the lands eventually.
Unless of course the energy would boil away a major part of our atmosphere... That'd be like, a major bummer.
Anyway, it's curious how a neutron star could have a magnetic field at all, as neutrons are supposed to be... Well, neutral.
K.I.L.E.R said:
The gamma-ray fluence from a GRB in our close proximity (I forget precisely what close is, 1kiloparsec I think) would flash-ionise the Earth's atmosphere. That's one mechanism.
Some semi-serious scientists worked the numbers out some time ago, I dunno if it ever got published in a proper journal though. They even went as far as to suggest that GRBs might be a reason that life isn't prevalent in the Galaxy (basically, GRBs happen sufficiently regularly to reset the clock by wiping out any life that has developed in a goodly chunk of the Galaxy).
Guden Oden said:Anyway, it's curious how a neutron star could have a magnetic field at all, as neutrons are supposed to be... Well, neutral.
in layman's term: neutrons have a magnetic moment (the so-called anomalous m. m.) due to their inner structure. It's one the reasons why neutron scattering is widely used.
Joe DeFuria
Legend
God Damn America and our SUVs!
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MuFu said:
I never meant with my comment I meant I didn't know they have magnetic fields, I just said it's curious they do, as magnetism in ordinary matter comes from the movement of electrons in the structure of the object and neutrons obviously have no electrons circling them...
Besides, I dunno what the star reference's supposed to be about - the structure of a neutron star isn't anything like that of an ordinary star. If you take a coke can and crush it down to a billionth its original size or something like that, you'd be hard-pressed to squeeze in any coke in it despite it was originally a coke can...
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