- 2802 - SPACE - hazards to avoid? Astronomers have been studying over 2,000 Pulsars and Magnetars and they have interesting stories. The names are not important but I will identify them just for your own research. There are so many hazards in outer space beginning with the vacuum of space.
------------------------------ 2802 - SPACE - hazards to avoid?
- Space hazards are not just star explosions. It starts with the vacuum of space itself.
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- July 2003 the world saw the tragedy of Columbia as the spacecraft tried to return to Mother Earth. Once in space Earth becomes the heaven you want to get to.
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- On March 18, 1965 Soviet cosmonaut, Aleksei Leonov was outside his space craft, the Voskhod 2, when his space suit started expanding. The flexible pressurized material started inflating like a balloon. When he tried to get back through the open hatch he would not fit.
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- Leonov started releasing pressure from his suit but the suit had already stretched and it wouldn’t shrink enough to fit through the hatch. When the air was nearly gone out of the suit and he was about to lose consciousness he managed to squeeze through the hatch and get back to safety.
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- In outer space, or standing on the Moon, unprotected the skin on the shadow side of the body would freeze at -250 Fahrenheit. At the same time the skin facing the Sun would be lit with ultraviolet radiation 250 times more intense than a summer beach tan. Your skin would blister and burn in 14 seconds.
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- We all know that water boils at lower temperatures at higher altitudes. Coffee boils in Denver 10 degrees cooler that it does in San Francisco. At 63,000 feet elevation at 98.6 Fahrenheit your blood begins to boil. The blood boiling happened to three Soviet cosmonauts in 1971 when a vent popped open in their space craft. Once the pressure was lost their blood came to a boil before they could close the vent.
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- In space unprotected parts of your body boil and freeze at the same time. The liquids in your body boil wildly and freeze instantly in to strange ice sculptures.
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- Astronauts in outer space after leaving the Earth’s magnetosphere started seeing meteors whiz in front to their eyes. Medical experts on the ground concluded that cosmic rays were zipping through their skulls setting off false signals inside their brains. That can’t be good for you. But, maybe you have experienced one of those flashes?
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I think I will go home, sit in by back yard and just stare into space. I don’t need to go there. It gets worse if you encounter a gamma ray burst. The further you go into space the more hazards you encounter:
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- If you could actually see gamma ray bursts they would drive you nuts. They hit us on average once a day, coming from any direction and would briefly out shine everything else in the sky. They last less than 17 seconds with some faint afterglow lasting minutes later.
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- Gamma ray bursts have been spotted 12,800,000,000 light years away. They are caused by massive stars, greater than 30 times our Sun, that collapse into a black hole when their fuel burns up. Massive stars only live a few million years because they burn fuel so rapidly. In contrast our Sun will live 12,000,000,000 years before it turns into a red giant.
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- These gamma ray bursts started occurring 900,000 years after the Big Bang , indicating that massive stars must have formed very rapidly. The early Universe must have been full of massive stars and exploding stars. When these stars explode they collapse in one second due to their massive gravity. When they collapse they create a cone shaped jet of gamma ray radiation shooting out the pole of the spinning black hole that remains.
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- This is all happening once a day at the edge of our Universe. They are the farthest things away but we can still see them because the burst of radiation is so powerful. Gamma ray bursts are the third wonder and hazard of the Universe.
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- Neutron Stars, Pulsars and Magnetars also come from dying stars. A star’s life is determined by its size. Mass is everything. Our Sun, with a solar mass of 1, is our standard unit of measurement.
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- One solar mass is 1,980,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms (1.98*10^30), or 330,000 Earth masses.
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- Stars range in mass from 0.2 solar mass to 25 solar mass. Above 26 solar mass the star becomes a Black Hole.
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----------------------------- up to 7 solar mass - White Dwarf
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---------------------------- 8 to 25 solar mass - Neutron Star
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---------------------------- greater than 26 solar mass - Black Hole
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- Our Sun will evolve into a White Dwarf in another 5 billion years.
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- There are about 1 million Neutron Stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. About 2,000 of these have been discovered to date. Most of the neutron stars identified are Pulsars. About 12 have been identified as Magnetars.
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----------------------------- Pulsars -Period < 1 second -Magnetism 10^8 gauss
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----------------------------- Magnetars -Period > 10 seconds -Magnetism 10^14 gauss
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- The differences between Pulsars and Magnetars is their rotation periods and the strength of their magnetic fields. Pulsars have rotation periods of .001 to 1 second per revolution while Magnetars are much slower, 10 to 100 seconds per revolution.
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- The magnetic field of a Pulsar is 10^8 gauss, while the magnetic field of a Magnetar is over 1000 times greater, up to 10^15 gauss. Both have jets of charged particles and radiation that shoot out the magnetic poles of the rotating Neutron Star.
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- If the spin axis is offset from the magnetic poles axis the jets are rotating beams, like lighthouse beacons, sweeping around circles in space. If the path of the beam sweeps through Earth we see a pulse of radiation, thus the name Pulsars. Most Pulsar’s radiation beams are radio waves.
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- Magnetars are more massive with 1000 times greater magnetic fields and they pulse radiation in x-rays and gamma rays. Magnetars magnetic fields are immense, a billion times stronger than any magnet produced on Earth.
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- A rotating magnet gives of energy and this causes the Magnetar Neutron Star to slow down its rotation over time. After 10,000 years the decelerating spin of the Magnetar will cease giving off the X-ray pulses.
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- Magnetars are created when the most massive stars go Supernova. When massive stars, 25 to 40 solar mass explode in a Supernova 10% to 20% of the mass may be blown off into space leaving a mass less than 26 solar mass behind as a remnant. If the mass is greater than 26 solar mass the remnant is a Black Hole.
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- The massive star has a short life, maybe 10 million years. It burns all its fuel up to iron, fusion of all the elements from hydrogen, helium, lithium, …………… up to iron. When the star is mostly all iron, fusion stops.
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- There is no fusion radiation created to hold the star up from the opposing gravity. The star collapses. If the weight of the star remnant is greater than 7 solar mass the pressure of gravity will be so great as to crush the iron atoms themselves.
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- The atom’s electrons collapse from their shells into the nucleus, smashing into protons and forming neutrons. A super dense Neutron Star is what remains. The rest of the star has exploded into space. The Neutron Star is 17 miles in diameter. It is so dense that one cubic centimeter (a sugar cube) would weigh 2,700,000,000 tons on Earth.
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- SGR 1806 observed December 27, 2004 was the brightest burst of gamma ray radiation ever recorded. It contained more energy in 0.1 seconds than the Sun emits in 100,000 years. After the spike of gamma rays there was a tail of X-rays followed by radio waves.
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- Astronomers believe that the intense radiation was created when the intense, rotating magnetic fields of a Magnetar become twisted and snap, disconnecting and reconnecting, causing a starquake in the surface of the Neutron Star and an enormous outpouring of energy. The expanding energy creates a bubble of colliding matter and interstellar gas.
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- This expanding bubble is traveling at 25% the speed of light and emitting radio waves. This particular Magnetar was 50,000 lightyears away and astronomers expect to be able to monitor this afterglow of radio waves for another 15 years.
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- Another expanding bubble 70 lightyears across has a Magnetar at its center. The original massive star must have been 30 to 40 solar mass exploding at 5 to 6 million years of age about 3,000 years ago. This bubble can not be expanding from the X-ray radiation pressure alone. It is not strong enough. There must also be solar wind of charged particles traveling 5 times faster and a million time denser than our Sun’s solar wind.
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- Another explanation is that the extra power is coming from neutrinos radiating out of the star’s inner core. These explanations are still coming up short.
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- A third theory is that the collapsing inner core sets up an oscillation, a vibration of sound waves in the acoustic range of 200 to 400 cycles per second. This acoustic power coming from an vibrating core would act like a very strong speaker sending out energy via sound waves. This could create enough energy to explain the expanding bubble of dense hot gas. More observations and calculations are needed before we know which alternative is the correct one.
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- August 27, 1998 Earth was struck by a brilliant gamma ray flare thought to be caused by a starquake on a Magnetar. The Neutron Star has a thin crust of iron nuclei packed into a crystal lattice and magnetic field equal to 44,000,000,000,000 gauss.
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- The Earth’s magnetic field that turns a compass needle is 0.6 gauss. A permanent magnet that sticks to the refrigerator is 100 gauss. A billion gauss would turn your body into magnetized mush. The starquake occurs when this intense magnetic field gets twisted and snaps, disconnecting and reconnecting, cracking the diamond like crust in the surface of the star. The star quake releases an intense flash of gamma rays.
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- The closest Neutron Star to us is RXJ1856 spotted in 1992, confirmed to be a neutron star in 1996, is 200 lightyears away. The closest it will get is 170 lightyears in 300,000 years from now.
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- It is 7 miles in diameter traveling at 240,000 miles per hour. It is traveling alone; however, there is a second hot, blue star traveling in the opposite direction. These two must have been a binary system that were shot apart when one star went supernova about 1 million years ago.
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- PSRJO737 is a binary system of two neutron stars 2,000 lightyears away, orbiting each other every 2.4 hours. They are twice as far apart as the Earth and the Moon. Only 6 Neutron Star pairs have been discovered to date.
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- Massive stars in orbit are under constant acceleration, constant speed but constantly changing direction in a circular orbit. Einstein’s equations show that huge masses under acceleration will emit gravitational waves, similar to the way accelerating charged particles emit electromagnetic waves.
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- Except gravity is much weaker and the gravitational waves are much more difficult to detect. The gravitational waves do carry off energy, and the orbit of the rotating stars is decaying. In 85 million years they will have spiraled into a massive collision, probably merging into a Black Hole.
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- Gravitational waves are just beginning to get detected. These orbits are predictably decaying just as the equations say with gravity waves being created. New instruments are designed to detect these waves. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, LIGO, has just begun detecting these gravity waves generated by rotating Neutron Stars, or rotating Black Holes.
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- RXJ1856 is much smaller in diameter than expected for Neutron Stars, only 7 miles diameter. It is also very hot: 1,200,000 degrees F. This star coupled with a second star 3C-58 that went supernova in the year 1181 have similar properties and are convincing astronomers that these Neutron Stars have collapsed into a new form of matter.
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- The star’s core is no longer neutrons but quark-gluon plasma. Astronomers want to study these stars more closely. If RXJ1856 is made only of quarks it will have a sharp edge. If it made of neutrons it will have a fuzzy edge along its outer iron surface typical of neutron stars.
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- Quarks have never been observed and we do not expect to ever see one using Earth based experiments. If Neutron Stars have actually created stand alone quarks, a new form of matter, it would be an astonishing discovery for scientists.
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- August 26, 2020 590 593 642 2802
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