quote: A beautiful pinwheel in space might one day blast Earth with death rays, scientists now report.
...
"I used to appreciate this spiral just for its beautiful form, but now I can't help a twinge of feeling that it is uncannily like looking down a rifle barrel," said researcher Peter Tuthill, an astronomer at the University of Sydney.
The fiery pinwheel in space in question has at its heart a pair of hot, luminous stars locked in orbit with each other. As they circle one another, plumes of streaming gas driven from the surfaces of the stars collide in the intervening space, eventually becoming entangled and twisted into a whirling spiral by the orbits of the stars.
Both the massive stars in WR 104 will one day explode as supernovae. However, one of the pair is a highly unstable star known as a Wolf-Rayet, the last known stable phase in the life of these massive stars right before a supernova.
"Wolf-Rayet stars are regarded by astronomers as ticking bombs," Tuthill explained. The 'fuse' for this star "is now very short — to an astronomer — and it may explode any time within the next few hundred thousand years."
When the Wolf-Rayet goes supernova, "it could emit an intense beam of gamma rays coming our way," Tuthill said. "If such a 'gamma ray burst' happens, we really do not want Earth to be in the way."
Since the initial blast would travel at the speed of light, there would be no warning of its arrival.
Gamma ray bursts are the most powerful explosions known in the universe. They can loose as much energy as our sun during its entire 10 billion year lifetime in anywhere from milliseconds to a minute or more.
The spooky thing about this pinwheel is that it appears to be a nearly perfect spiral to us, according to new images taken with the Keck Telescope in Hawaii. "It could only appear like that if we are looking nearly exactly down on the axis of the binary system," Tuthill said.
posted
Cooool. Neato. "The 'fuse' for this star is now very short — to an astronomer — and it may explode any time within the next few hundred thousand years."
Or it may have already exploded and the GammaRay wavefront is even now travelling in our direction.
And in Sagittarius lays the BlackRoad* to the Underworld which marks the Mayan End of Times. The good part being that we still have until the end of 2012 before getting fried.
* A BlackHole is created by the supernova of a Wolf-Rayet star which produces focused GammaRayBursts. BlackHoles can also be used to create wormholes: ie "roads"/paths from one region of spacetime to another region of spacetime that bypass normal spacetime and thus the lightspeed limit.
posted
Yeah, that's basically what I got from it too. But that's really cool. You have to admit, in a choice between Global Warming, and getting shot by a Death Star-like pinwheel's death rays, I'd choose death rays any day.
Posts: 1789 | Registered: Jul 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Nah. See global warming means a slow and painful death, over decades. A death ray is instant and painless, and really frickin cool!
Posts: 1789 | Registered: Jul 2003
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
