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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
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| Posted: 27 February 2018 at 5:56am | IP Logged | 1
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Stellar flare in Proxima CentauriLINK
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Robbie Parry
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 17 June 2007
Location: United Kingdom
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| Posted: 27 February 2018 at 6:24am | IP Logged | 2
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It's fascinating stuff.
I took out a subscription to the magazine ALL ABOUT SPACE (UK). It is a privilege to be alive, as we explore further and further.
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Petter Myhr Ness
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Joined: 02 July 2009
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| Posted: 27 February 2018 at 6:37am | IP Logged | 3
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Indeed. There are phenomenons out there in space that could kill us before breakfast. We live in a very unsafe neighbourhood. Yet we're still here.
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Steve Coates
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Joined: 17 November 2014
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| Posted: 27 February 2018 at 6:56am | IP Logged | 4
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Occurred over four years ago.
I think it is also accurate to say the flare rules out terrestrial life on the planet.:)
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
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| Posted: 27 February 2018 at 7:10am | IP Logged | 5
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I find it curious the way astronomers tend to refer to these distant events as if they are happening now. "A star just exploded in the Andromeda galaxy!" Well, two million years ago, you mean!I suppose they do it to avoid confusing the less scientifically literate people who might be in the audience.
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Robbie Parry
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| Posted: 27 February 2018 at 7:48am | IP Logged | 6
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I suppose they do it for that reason. At secondary school, and maybe even in primary school, the teachers used to make a point of explaining certain events having occurred years ago.
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Michael Penn
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Joined: 12 April 2006
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| Posted: 27 February 2018 at 7:50am | IP Logged | 7
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Charged particles blown out of a stellar flare traveling at the speed of light still take unfathomable amounts of time to be observable by us insects.
The distances between any "things" in space is... GAH!
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Eric Sofer
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Joined: 31 January 2014
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| Posted: 27 February 2018 at 7:57am | IP Logged | 8
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Although it isn't very hard to state the event accurately. "We just observed a star exploding in the Andromeda Galaxy!"
Just a small effort to try to bring the scientifically illiterate a little more up to date.
Tangential to this is one of the models of the universe I have in my mind, where I see Earth and the stars laid out... but instead of distances between stars, I think of what we see as time between stars. So Centauri as four years away, and the outer galaxies as thousands (millions, etc.) of years away.
So every now and again, I think of Superman's journey from Krypton not as a distance, but as time passed. Like calendar pages flipping past on the stellar winds...
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Vinny Valenti
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| Posted: 27 February 2018 at 8:02am | IP Logged | 9
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This reminds me of a shower thought I have every now and then: If our Sun were suddenly snuffed out right now - since nothing travels faster than light, it would be impossible for Earth to notice any detrimental effect of that happening for around 8 minutes, no? For those 8 minutes, there would be no sudden drop in temperature, nor would anything go dark, and there would be no change in Earth's orbit. If my premise is correct (and it may well not be), if the Sun died at 12:00, for all intents and purposes, for us it really happened around 12:08, no?
Extrapolating that out to events from millions of light years away really messes with my concept of time. Technically the star exploded millions of years ago, but for us it's just happening now because the light (or anything else that the event could affect us with, for that matter) can't reach us until now.
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John Byrne
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| Posted: 27 February 2018 at 8:49am | IP Logged | 10
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This reminds me of a shower thought I have every now and then: If our Sun were suddenly snuffed out right now - since nothing travels faster than light, it would be impossible for Earth to notice any detrimental effect of that happening for around 8 minutes, no?•• I've wondered about this. Does gravity have a "speed"? (I recall either the Flash or Quicksilver running up a wall "faster than gravity"!) I suspect that if anything happened to the Sun, such that its gravimetric effects were disrupted, we'd feel it instantly.
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Dale Lerette
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Joined: 24 March 2010
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| Posted: 27 February 2018 at 9:33am | IP Logged | 11
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I am reminded of a comic I read long ago...
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John Byrne
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| Posted: 27 February 2018 at 9:53am | IP Logged | 12
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And thank you, Chris, for obscuring the art with verbose descrptions of -- the art.
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