Sea Life Wiped Out by Neutron Star Collision? 726
Memorize writes "Scientists report in the Journal of Astrophysical Letters that a mass extinction of marine life 450 million years ago might have been caused by radiation from an exploding star, such as a collision between two neutron stars, or a neutron star collapsing into a black hole. Such an event would cause a ten-second burst of gamma radiation, and if it occurred within our galaxy, it could have wiped out many species on earth. At least if astronomers find out that an asteroid is heading our way, we can do something about it, but if there is a gamma burst, we get no warning. And if we did, would there be any way to protect the planet?"
Scary Stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember reading this a while back on the Wikipedia entry for the Permian Triassic Extinction Event (link [wikipedia.org]), but the Wiki entry quotes specifically that an extinction like this would only happen if the star were 10 parsecs, or 30 light years away.
Dr Melott in the article claims that a star like this would have to be 6,000 light years away, or closer. (That's more than 200 times the distance previously claimed.
Keep in mind the volume of a sphere is 4/3 pi r^3, so the volume of space that this would take up is increased by a factor of 8,000,000. I'd say, that the chance of this happening to us, therefore is increased by a factor of 8 million.
As I said before, scary stuff.
Re:Scary Stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted, this could completely destroy the human race, but either way I'm dead, so my stake in it is over.
Re:Scary Stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
Something like this, you have absolutely no legacy whatsoever. No kids to carry things on, nobody left to remember you, none of your accomplishments mattering.
I, for one, don't want to see the human race become extinct, regardless of if it's in my lifetime or not.
Re:Scary Stuff (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Scary Stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
From that perspective, my personal death is NOT as important as the continuation of my children.
Most parents know this at the instinctual level.
The argument that says I'm going to die - what to I care about the rest of humanity - is clearly bogus for most humans. All life on earth strives harder to pass on genetic information than to survive as an individual. That's why we age - and why we fall apart much more rapidly after child-rearing age is past.
Re:Scary Stuff - Child rearing (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Scary Stuff - Child rearing (Score:3, Insightful)
Stress is a symptom of other problems, not a cause, the way of your body telling you you are doing something very wrong in maintaining it. The sooner everyone realizes this, the happier they will be.
Re:Scary Stuff - Child rearing (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, but we evolved to run after food every day, and survive without when we couldn't catch it. Modern life has changed faster than evolution can keep up. We aren't made to sit in a cubicle all day. We aren't made to drive cars everywhere, or get a meal whenever we want it, or play video games after sitting in a classroom all day. Hence many problems from living a modern life; American obesity comes to mind.
Re:Scary Stuff - Child rearing (Score:3, Informative)
No, stress kills [cbsnews.com].
The difference is, those stresses your body/mind is adapted to.
About to get trampled by a mastodon? Bam! Adrenaline surge, you run, condition resolved and a few hours later your body chemistry is completely norm
Re:Scary Stuff - Child rearing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Scary Stuff - Child rearing (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, excellent band name!
Re:Scary Stuff - Child rearing (Score:4, Funny)
Hey, I'll have you know the vending machine is *all the way* on the *other* side of the building. As soon aa a cube over there frees up, I'm outta here. Hmm, it might speed things up if I push Joe in front of that next mammoth.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Scary Stuff - Child rearing (Score:3, Informative)
Like...?
diaper changes in your 80's.
Re:Scary Stuff - Child rearing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Scary Stuff - Child rearing (Score:3, Insightful)
Or the sheer wonderment and joy on their faces as they experience something new to them, that you take for granted everyday. (Think elevators for a minute, or escalators until security shows up
Or doing the inevitable childrens damage to themselves, and crying, yet a kiss f
Ah, yes: the selfish gene (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Ah, yes: the selfish gene (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ah, yes: the selfish gene (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Scary Stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
If so, they've chosen a fantastically inefficient way to do it, haven't they? You could have a dozen kids, and still lose 0.024% of your genes forever. If you have two kids, a full 1/4 of your genes would never be transmitted to posterity.
Sexual reproduction is a good trade-off for an organism, but a terrible deal for the organism's genes.
--Tom
Re:not anymore (Score:4, Insightful)
Further, are human morals, theories, and ideas more important to spread than those of protozoans? And before you answer that they do not have any of those, I challenge you to irrefutably prove it.
Now that you realize you are a miniscule and insignificant creature (like the rest of us), go home and cry and welcome your gamma-ray overlords.
Re:Scary Stuff (Score:3, Informative)
Not true, several people have suggested selection mechanisms for longevity. And it seems reasonable that they exist, even if the proposed ones are not those responsible. Why? Because we are capable of living decades after our fertility has ended. A small number of people with a trait and it can be argued that it nonselected, but when it is true of almost everyone in the population that argument becomes untenable. Unless by longevit
Re: The Biology of Senesence (Score:4, Interesting)
However, the question with regard to rate is of the utmost importance in self-replicating systems. Bacteria in a sense do not die, in that they clone themselves (albeit with sometimes intermittant reproduction through genetic exchange with other bacteria) and hence in a sense are immortal (they make identical copies of themselves which persist more or less indefinitely).
Studies of the aging process (ie genes controling catabolism relative to anabolism) in eucaryotic organisms suggest that genetic systems have evolved genes that actually shorten life span. Hence, the question arises as to why, since one might initially assume that being able to live forever (like bacteria) would seem a more effective reproductive strategy.
It turns out that there appears to be selection for genes that produce shorter life spans in situations in which the presence of such genes increases the probability of survival of the offspring, even if their activity/presence takes place at the expense of the parent. It would seem that perpuation of self-replicating systems necessarily requires the need to take some risks to overcome the reality of dynamic environments. Ones current genetic makeup although nearly optimal (or more apply sufficiently near optimal) in the current environment may not be so in a future environment. Hence, a slightly different genetic makeup in ones offspring may be selected for in some future environment. Since prediction of exactly what the future environment might be is to some degree uncertain, most sexual organisms are capable of having more than one offspring, thereby increasing variety and hence the probability that at least some will be nearly optimally suited to survive.
Keep in mind, however, this is only an evolutionary strategy. While only those gene combinations that are successfull in reproducing will persist in subsequent generations, there is no guarantee that a particular gene combination will survive.
As for your arguments regarding "genes not grading anything in levels of mportance or having a perspective", this is really little more than a matter of semantics. The adult phenotype is nothing more than the product of its genes acting in an environment during its ontogeny. While it might seem to we are something more than our genes, at a molecular level there is nothing about us that is not the direct result of metabolic processes that occur (or occurred) as the direct result of the collective response/relative control of our genes to our environment. However, when you consider the shear number of different variatnts of tens of thousands of human genes and the incredible diversity of their responses to slightly different kinds of environments, the complexity is truely something to marvel at; so much so that it is hardly worth worrying about whether or not "something" (like some kind on mystical spiritual essesence or soul or other such unecessary nonsense) is missing.
Re: The Biology of Senesence (Score:5, Insightful)
This argument is so often used falsely about biological systems that it needs correcting (even though I doubt you intended to sound like a creationist). Organized systems will decay towards randomness without energy input. Fortunately there's this huge fusion furnace in the sky dumping energy into the system like crazy.
There may well be a reason why organized systems tend to have limited duration, but it's not thermodynamics!
Re: The Biology of Senesence (Score:3, Interesting)
Please enlighten me.
Re:Scary Stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
Ozymandias (Score:5, Interesting)
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Sound familiar?
Re:Scary Stuff (Score:3, Funny)
That is probably true of 90% of the people reading that post.
Re:Scary Stuff (Score:4, Insightful)
A random gamma ray burst on the other hand I can do nothing about. [0] Since a big part of our point is the continuation of our race as a whole (we are genetically predisposed to want to do this), we will also be hard wired to fear events that can totally end the entire genetic line of our species. Also, I expect a death by gamma ray burst would be drawn out and deeply unpleasant. Dying of radiation poisoning whilst watching everyone around you do the same thing will be a pretty nasty event.
[0] No, I don't actually sit around worrying about gamma ray bursts, in fact I give it very little thought. I give much more thought to ways of avoiding being run down by cars.
Re:Scary Stuff (Score:4, Funny)
Neither do I. I *know* my tinfoil hat will protect me.
Details you might want to know (Score:4, Interesting)
- Supernovae may not be predictable, but mergers of neutron stars may be. If theory of gravity waves is correct, we could detect the orbital spin-ups before mergers using laser interferometers.
- If you can stick enough mass in the path of the burst to scatter the gamma rays to lower-energy photons or deflect them entirely, you could prevent this problem. This means having a disc of material at least 8000 miles across in the exact right place to shadow the Earth at the moment of the burst, but I never said it would be a small job.
From this, it follows that long-baseline laser interferometers and GRB research are good things for now. Aiming for serious space-construction capability is a good long-term goal.Re:Scary Stuff (Score:3, Informative)
It wouldn't be radiation poisoning. Gamma rays cannot penetrate our atmosphere. It would just remove about half the ozone layer (by converting Nitrogen gas into various nitrous oxides), which in turn would kill off a lot of plankton.
The effect on terrestrial life would probably be substantially less. Terrestrial plants are more resistant to UV, and terrestrial animals tend to have fur/clothes, so they are more resistant as well.
I'm not saying it isn't a bad thing, but we've pretty much achieved the same e
Re:Scary Stuff (Score:3, Funny)
Actually I spend a lot of time worring about the atoms of my underwear doing that...
OK, I'll be honest. I spend a lot of time hoping the atoms of the underwear the hostess of the party will do that... but then I don't tend to get invited to those kinds of parties.
DNA, you are missed.
Re:Where's the raw data? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure that's the principal reason we invented religion, but it is one of the main reasons for its broad appeal...
Because people don't understand large numbers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Scary Stuff (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Scary Stuff (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Scary Stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
Exept that our galaxy is a disc, not a sphere. Also, don't forget that we're towards the edge of that disc.
Personally, I see 6000 lt-yr still being pretty "close" (and probably "unlikely") when you consider our galaxy is roughly 100,000 lt-yr in diameter. If it happened often enough for us to be worried about, we'd see more such collisions within our galaxy beyond the 6000 lt-yr theoretical safe distance.
Besides, what are the odds of two stars colliding such a manner, anyway? It seems the odds of a binary star becoming a pair of neutron (or denser) stars seem to be slim to none: you'd think the creation of one neutron star out of one would consume/destroy the other before it had the chance to follow suit. So we're really dealing with an intersection of two previously unassociated stars. And it's called "space" for a reason.
I'd worry more about comets and asteroids at this point and put this one in the category of "When we have to start worrying about it, we'll probably be advanced enough to do something about it," kinda like the sun going nova.
Optimal solution here (Score:5, Funny)
It doesn't seem quite so scary to me (Score:5, Informative)
If the 6,000 LY limit is justifiable, I don't think it's quite as bad as you make out... at least not without some much more definitive research.
6,000 Light Years is practically next door on the galactic scale. It's certainly not infeasible (for someone qualified) to simply look at a survey of what's in our local space and determine immediately if we're at risk based on anything that looks unstable. (I'm not a professional astronomer, so someone's welcome to correct me if they know otherwise.)
The most obvious potential threat that's relatively close is probably Eta Carinae [seds.org], which is about as massive as it's possible to get, and it's been hypothesised in the past that there's a small chance we might be at risk from a sudden gamma ray burst from it. But it's still about 8,000 light years away and there's still not enough known about it to have any accurate idea of when it's going to blow itself apart, either tommorrow or millions of years from now.
If there's still a reasonable chance that it could happen at some point in the future, this doesn't mean that there's any chance at all of it happening tommorrow. Stars orbit move a lot relative to each other sa they orbit the galactic centre. Our Sun does that in about 226 million years, but in the space of hundreds of thousands of years, galactic material barely moves relative to each other at all. It's feasible that at some time in the next few million years or more we will be close to something dangerous for some period of time. If we're not close enough to it now, though, the chance of that happening is still zero.
This is all dependent on that 6,000 Light Year limit being correct, of course. Clearly it's still all subject to change as we learn more about the Universe, which we still know next-to-nothing about. I don't think there's much point worrying about the great unknown, though, at least until we know enough to know that there's actually a risk. Otherwise it would just lead to paranoia.
Re:It doesn't seem quite so scary to me (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Scary Stuff (Score:3, Informative)
I care about neutrinos! (Score:3, Interesting)
Consider this:
As I'm sure you know, neutrinos very rarely interact with matter, but they do interact. Now, currently we are bathed with a flux of approximately 5,000,000 neutrinos/cm^2/s (could be off by a factor of 3, and depends on what kind of neutrinos you're talking about). At this flux, interactions are extremely rare and we have to set up huge tubs of water or cleaning fluid in order to detect them. However, what if the flux was not 5 x 10^6, but was on the order of 10^10? Well, I don't know, but I
Where's the science? (Score:5, Interesting)
As per your instructions... (Score:5, Funny)
Good luck sir, and Godspeed!
Check the research article (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the basic info:
Title: Did a gamma-ray burst initiate the late Ordovician mass extinction?
Abstract: Gamma-ray bursts (hereafter GRB) produce a flux of radiation detectable across the observable Universe, and at least some of them are associated with galaxies. A GRB within our own Ggalaxy could do considerable damage to the Earth's biosphere; rate estimates suggest that a dangerously near GRB should occur on average two or more times per billion years. At least five times in the history of life, the Earth experienced mass extinctions that eliminated a large percentage of the biota. Many possible causes have been documented, and GRB may also have contributed. The late Ordovician mass extinction approximately 440 million years ago may be at least partly the result of a GRB. A special feature of GRB in terms of terrestrial effects is a nearly impulsive energy input of order 10 s. Due to expected severe depletion of the ozone layer, intense solar ultraviolet radiation would result from a nearby GRB, and some of the patterns of extinction and survivorship at this time may be attributable to elevated levels of UV radiation reaching the Earth. In addition a GRB could trigger the global cooling which occurs at the end of the Ordovician period that follows an interval of relatively warm climate. Intense rapid cooling and glaciation at that time, previously identified as the probable cause of this mass extinction, may have resulted from a GRB.
Yet another reason (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yet another reason (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, all this does is strip off the ozone layer, which would mess with the marine food chain for a few years. It's not like it would bake people or anything. I'm sure we'll collectively do more damage to the sea than this sort of thing ever could. How fast will we destroy 60% of the ocean's species? I'm guessing something on
Re:Yet another reason (Score:3, Interesting)
Normally, I'd say travel to other worlds is largely useful to protect against man-made disasters, but some of the technology needed to make other worlds livable without special habitats could actually help in this case.
Wait... did I just say that our President isn'
Re:bad reason for a space program (Score:3, Insightful)
Never mind that, what about the far side of THIS planet? I have a hard time believing that gamma rays could be much of a threat with 7,000 miles of rock and molten iron for shielding. Energy transmission falls off exponentially with linear increases in the thickness of your shielding, don't forget.
Unless it's the Big Bang reprised, I don't think any organism on the "dark side" of the Earth would suffer a bit o
in that case (Score:4, Funny)
No. (Score:5, Funny)
No.
Gee, I wish all "Ask Slashdot" postings were this easy..
Oh come on! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No. (Score:2)
You're counting things out waaay too easily. I mean, NOW is the time to construct your house out of tin-foil.
All you have to figure out now is how to get 20 of the world's prettiest supermodels at your house, and some animal specimens, during the time of this burst, so you could repopulate the earth later.
It'd be just like Noah's Ark, only... well... not...
Re:No. (Score:5, Funny)
Well, you could probably save on space a little by just simply keeping about 5 sheep in the house.
Re:No. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:No. (Score:3, Interesting)
Shielding for ? rays requires large amounts of mass. The material used for shielding takes into account that gamma rays are better absorbed by materials with high atomic number and high density. Also, the higher the energy of the gamma rays, the thicker the shielding required. Materials for shielding gamma rays are typically illustrated by the thickness required to reduce the intensity of the
Re:No. (Score:3, Interesting)
Not nearly good enough. (Score:5, Insightful)
Surviving the first 10 seconds is not the problem. Surviving the next 30 years is the problem.
There have been many articles and papers and whatnot published over the last several years, all proposing different models of what happens when Earth gets hit by a gamma-ray burst. They all point to Very Bad Things happening to the atmospheric layers, which then has a cascading effect.
Fine, you survive the first 10 seconds, but none of the crops did. Growing new crops in time to feed anyone is problematic when the UV shielding is gone. Reactions in the lower atmosphere would likely form a fair deal of the chemicals that result in "acid rain", so once you're wearing 100% UV sunscreen and can go outside, you still can't grow anything. Etc, etc.
Re:No. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No. (Score:5, Funny)
Consults Homeland Defense Handbook ...
... it says here to "Duck and Cover".
I guess all that duct tape and plastic wrap will not be useful.
Well, it's not all bad (Score:5, Funny)
C'mon (Score:3, Interesting)
Tried and True (Score:5, Funny)
Independant confirmation (Score:5, Funny)
So anyways, we put Sea Monkeys in a microwave oven.
lenny bruce is not afraid (Score:5, Insightful)
Greg Egan's Diaspora (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Greg Egan's Diaspora - Speak for yourself (Score:3, Funny)
No - we're doomed. (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose we could make a REALLY good predictive model of when astronomical objects are likely to do this - and predict the arrival of a gamma ray burst in time to do something about it. But what could we possibly do?
It takes a good few inches of lead (or a good few feet of concrete, dirt, whatever) to significantly attenuate gamma rays - and if the ones were are talking about were powerful enough to get through the full depth of the earth's oceans and still kill things when they got there - then you'd need to wrap the earth in a few feet of lead - or hide down some amazingly deep mine-shafts.
Since gamma rays are electrically neutral, you can't deflect them away with magnets or anything like that.
We'd have to get out of the way - but this radiation will be expanding out equally in all directions from the source. Unless we had thousands of years of warning, we'd have to high-tail it outta here at close to the speed of light in order to get far enough away for the inverse-square law to have an effect. If we're 100 light years from the source (say) and a mile of salt water doesn't attenuate the energy enough - then we'd need to be *way* more than 200 light years away if we could carry a quarter of a mile of water as a shield, 400 light years away if we had a sixteenth of a mile of water....for any reasonable amount of shielding, we need thousands of years notice of the problem happening.
In all likelyhood, we'd just sit back and let our great, great, great grandchildren deal with the problem.
We're basically doomed unless we have some kind of science-fiction technology.
Re:No - we're doomed. (Score:5, Insightful)
For that matter, even without warning around half the world population would automatically be shielded - well if China and India were on the exposed side that might be much less than half though
Re:No - we're doomed. (Score:3, Interesting)
Loss of ozone (Score:5, Informative)
Short Answer: RTFA
Long Answer:
The Gamma rays would destroy the ozone on the unlucky side. Once the ozone redistbutes, you are down to 50% everywhere. That is, aparently, enough to kill plankton. Probably would kill land plants, too.
So, on the unlucky side everybody dies. On the lucky side, crops fail for several years. Very bad news, though I doubt it would actually exterminate the human race. Plants would still grow in UV filtered green houses.
Re:Loss of ozone (Score:3, Interesting)
Additionally, last I've heard about the other gamma-ray based extinction, the problem wasn't just wiping out the ozone layer, but replacing it with a brown layer of nitrous oxide. It caused, if I remember right, a massive glaciation that lasted a million years.
Think the "nuclear winter" theories. Same idea here, except that instead of a layer of dust blocking the sun, you h
Re:No - we're doomed. (Score:5, Insightful)
According to the article the burst has to originate within 6,000 light years...so if we work out what causes them all we have to do is scour the near vicinty for the pairs of neutron stars required (if that's it). Not trivial but not impossible either. Once we've done that we will likely be able to predict when the burst will occur.
Not neccessarily - it depends on the source.
we'd have to high-tail it outta here at close to the speed of light in order to get far enough away for the inverse-square law to have an effect.
Actually you don't need to worry about the inverse square law if you are going that fast. Red shift will make the gamma's harmless.
If you actually read the article (but this is Slashdot so what am I talking about!) you'll see that the effect is caused by interaction between the gammas and the ozone layer. If the gammas had enough energy (or intensity) that a significant dose penetrated 1.6km of water the heat load would actually be what would kill you and not the radiation itself! Such a massive heat load would have melted rocks etc and, I would guess, leave a significant geological record. In any case there is no way the burst could penetrate the earth and affect life on the otherside directly which you scenario would require - otherwise no more than 50% of the earth could be affected and the seas far less than the land due to the water shielding.
Things We Can Do (Score:5, Funny)
2) Make a gigantic lead planetary Dyson sphere [wikipedia.org]
3) In the immortal words of David Levinson [imdb.com], "Uh, hide."
4) PANIC!!!
5) Seven words: Journey to the Center of the Earth [imdb.com].
6) Profit!!!
7) Seriously, did you just ask what we could do? Of course there's nothing we can do, you rhetorical-question-asking moron. We hope to Darwin that we can evolve.
8) Natalie Portman naked in hot grits. (If the world was about to end in a giant gamma ray bath, that is.)
p
Must not be a good correspondant (Score:3, Informative)
Monday April 11, 2005
Next month, Nasa will launch the £138m Swift probe, which will sweep up to one sixth of the sky at a time, looking for sudden bursts. If all goes well, the probe could catch two three explosions a week.
Swift was launched almost 6 months ago.
Slashdot Link [slashdot.org]
RE Sea Life Wiped Out by Neutron Star Collision? (Score:3, Funny)
I dunno, a massive pair of Blue Blockers?
Aftermath (Score:2)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553577387 / qid=1113283784/sr=2-3/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_3/104-8393393 -6164737 [amazon.com]
Asteroids and Neutrons (Score:2)
Greg Egan [netspace.net.au] has a simple solution to the neutron bombardment problem -- convert everybody into software [sfreviews.com]. I think he underestimates the technical issues...
It's The Gamma Radiation, Stupid (Score:2)
Science.... fiction (Score:3, Informative)
From the article:
Gamma ray bursts are thought to be caused either when two neutron stars collide or when giant stars collapse into black holes at the end of their lives.
Then you get this:
Black holes do not exist
http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/apr112005 /snt108532005410.asp [deccanherald.com]
So which one is it? Do black holes exist, or do they not?
I wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I wonder... (Score:4, Informative)
Half the planet (almost) instantly dead, the other side gets insta-sunburn the moment they walk outdoors for the next few years.
Are we really this blind? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Are we really this blind? (Score:3)
Do you happen to have a citation for that?
Re:Are we really this blind? (Score:3, Funny)
Three Simple Words (Score:2)
Reynolds
Wrap
Easy answer (Score:5, Interesting)
Uh, no? First, how would you propose we detect a gamma ray burst, which travels at the speed of light (of course), before it gets here? Second, you're talking about a pulse of energy strong enough to destroy life on a planetary scale from 6,000 light years away! How the hell are you going to protect against that?! Tin foil can't help you now!
On a side note, this was a plot device in a book by Stephen Baxter, although I can't remember the title. Every couple million years, two stars in the center part of the galaxy would collide, and knock all life in the galaxy back to single-stage or before; species would struggle back up the evolutionary ladder, and just as they achieved spaceflight, the next stars would collide. Great book-
Re:Easy answer (Score:4, Interesting)
Believe it or not, we have 3/4ths of our planet literally covered in one of the simplest ways known to block high-energy photons - Water.
The GRB in question killed sea life.
living deep inside a skyscraper won't save you. Living on the far side of the planet would, at least on the short-term, but the longer-term consequences of a GRB sterilizing one side of the planet would not leave the Earth a very health place.
From TFA: (Score:3, Informative)
Second, for all those posting that a 10 second gamma ray burst won't be lethal to all of us:
They don't RTFA, and they don't read all the other posts saying the same stupid thing. What do they think this is? Slashdot?
it's the ozone layer, not the radiation (Score:5, Informative)
While that would cause huge famines and disease and kill almost all humans, it is something that our species could survive given our technology.
Neutrino Detector... (Score:5, Interesting)
Photons (gamma rays) take a long time to get out of a star. But neutrinos, because of their physical properties, pass right through most of the star. Most nuclear reactions that generate photons also generate neutrinos. They're just very hard to detect (because of that same physical property).
Well, I'm working on a neutrino detector at the South Pole right now. http://icecube.wisc.edu/ [wisc.edu]
It could, when it's complete, pinpoint the source of the neutrinos. Given the energy level of the neutrinos and the sudden, large burst of them, a whole lot of scientists are going to be woken up - and I mean that literally.
An earlier version of the project, AMANDA http://amanda.wisc.edu/ [wisc.edu], already has a supernova detector. It hasn't gone off yet, but when it does it will start a sequence of events that ultimately steers a lot of telescopes to point at that supernova.
Re:Neutrino Detector... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Neutrino Detector... (Score:3, Interesting)
The neutrino gets out pretty much at the speed of light.
The problem is, you're talking about a different reaction. It's dependent on whatever reaction is causing the gamma-ray burst. Ask a physist how long the
Re:Neutrino Detector... (Score:3)
Half of the planet should be protected (Score:3)
Of course, side effects like a damaged ozone layer could spread to that side, but I fail to see how all life could be suddenly wiped out.
Re:There is a solution (Score:2)
Re:There is a solution (Score:2)
Sigh. I've come to believe that Science Fiction is the worst enemy of space exploration.
Re:There is a solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Binary pulsars and neutron stars do exist (Score:3, Informative)
Your second point about two neutron stars being unlikely to run into each other is not correct. Extensive studies of binary neutron star systems such as PSR B1913+16 and PSR B1534+12 provide stringent checks on general relativity. Each of these systems has two neutron stars orbiting each other with one of the pair also being detectable as a pulsar. Each component in the system is spiralling in to