Astrophysics News

Regular readers will know that I’m very taken with ’science made easy’ type descriptions of the vast size of the universe - see for example -

http://almax.wordpress.com/2007/08/05/my-favourite-books-50/

http://almax.wordpress.com/2007/06/17/is-there-life-on-mars/

http://almax.wordpress.com/2006/07/16/httpwwwrensecomgeneral72sizehtm-simply-amazing/

Now I’m going to quote from NewScientistSpace about something that happened this week - before you read this, open your mouth to its fullest extent - this will save your jaw dropping with amazement when you start reading -

The most powerful blast ever observed in the universe detonated on Wednesday. That day, a record four gamma-ray bursts were detected by NASA’s Swift telescope (shown below)

If you knew exactly when and where to look, you could have seen the bright burst with the naked eye, despite its enormous distance of 7.5 billion light years. “This burst definitely has an ‘oh wow’ flavour,” says astrophysicist Ralph Wijers of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Gamma-ray bursts are brief but extremely powerful flashes of high-energy radiation. Theorists think they signal the violent death of very massive, rapidly rotating stars. Gamma rays can’t penetrate Earth’s atmosphere, so they can only be observed by space telescopes. But many bursts also produce lower-energy X-rays, radio waves and even visible light. So if you’re quick enough, you can study gamma-ray bursts from the ground.

That’s where NASA’s Swift satellite comes in. It detects a burst, measures its sky position, and then radioes the results to robotic telescopes on the ground – all within seconds.

With four bursts, Wednesday was the busiest day in Swift’s life so far. The second of the four bursts, GRB 080319B, occurred at 0613 GMT in the northern constellation Bootes – well-placed for follow-up observations with telescopes in the US.

One of these robotic telescopes, called RAPTOR, was already looking in that part of the sky. It witnessed the quick rise and fall of an optical flash. About 30 to 40 seconds after the Swift detection, the burst peaked at naked-eye visibility, making this the only gamma-ray burst so far that could have been seen without a telescope.

But it took a few more hours to determine how powerful the burst really was. Paul Vreeswijk of the Dark Cosmology Center in Copenhagen, Denmark, led a team that measured the distance to the burst using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.

By studying how much the burst’s light had been stretched, or redshifted, as it travelled through the expanding universe, they put the explosion at 7.5 billion light years away. “At first, I had expected this burst to be much closer,” says Vreeswijk. “It’s exciting to be able to see something with the naked eye halfway across the universe.”

Knowing the distance, astronomers could calculate the burst’s true luminosity: 2.5 million times brighter than the most powerful supernova ever seen.

It’s unclear what exactly caused this incredible brightness, but most theorists think that gamma-ray bursts produce two narrow jets of matter and energy, so we may have been lucky to look right into the cannon’s barrel. But, says Vreeswijk’s colleague Jens Hjorth, “in this business, getting surprised ceases to surprise you“.

Follow-up studies of GRB 080319B’s afterglow are still in progress. Says Wijers: “It doesn’t shatter current theoretical thinking, but in terms of detailed knowledge, this will probably become the burst of the year.”

Let us put some of this stuff in some sort of context - the speed of light is 670 million miles per hour or thereby (give or take half a million mph). A light year is how far light will travel at that speed in one year (ie an unimaginably long way). The gamma bursts referred to above occurred 7.5 billion light years away (ie 670,000,000 x 24 x 365 x 7,500,000,000 = 44,019,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles). You’re not going there by Scotrail. Courtesy of Wikipedia, here’s a depiction of how long it takes for light to travel from the Earth to the Moon -

The History Channel elucidates further -

“Scientists at the University of Kansas believe gamma ray bursts were responsible for a great mass extinction on Earth 450 million years ago. The gamma rays strip away the ozone layer and generates a chemical smog, producing a widespread chill that grips the globe. Every few seconds, a supernova emits jets of deadly gamma rays somewhere in the galaxy. If one of these gamma ray bursts should happen sufficiently close to the solar system, all life would perish.“

And Wikipedia adds -

Research has been conducted to investigate the consequences of Earth being hit by a beam of gamma rays from a nearby (about 500 light years) gamma ray burst. This is motivated by the efforts to explain mass extinctions on Earth and estimate the probability of extraterrestrial life. A gamma ray burst at 6000 light years would result in mass extinction; a 1000 light year distant burst would be equivalent to a 100,000 megaton nuclear explosion. A burst 100 light years away would blow away the atmosphere, create tidal waves, and start to melt the surface of the earth. There is a one in a million chance that there could be a gamma ray burst as near as the earth’s closest star, Alpha Centauri, in the lifetime of the earth. Such a burst, at 4.3 lightyears distant, would effectively incinerate the earth.

Happy Easter

My Favourite Books

No 70 - Pegasus Descending by James Lee Burke

This is slightly unusual, because this is a book that I haven’t yet finished reading !!!.

If I was allowed to take only one book to the desert island, then the choice of author would be a close run thing between the obvious Tolstoy, Dickens, Dostoevsky and other similar heavyweights and James Lee Burke. Burke has appeared on this list before, with the very first of his ‘Dave Robicheaux’ novels, ‘The Neon Rain‘. That latter book was published in 1987, and over a series of novels since then, devotees have been able to follow the twists and turns and changes and evolution of Robicheaux’s life.

ALL of the Robicheaux books merit appearing on this list of my favourites, and if I live long enough, they eventually all will.

I’m slightly behind schedule in reading them, because Pegasus Descending is a 2006 publication, and I still have the 2007 ‘Hurricane Katrina’ novel ‘The Tin Roof Blowdown‘ on the shelf awaiting my attention (that latter is a hardback edition Christmas present from my brother Malcolm - my kith and kin know what I like !! Reading that one in hardback will be a rare pleasure to savour in due course).

So this is how I can choose a book that I’m only half way through as one of my favourites. I simply adore Burke’s style, and the plot of Pegasus is well up to his usual standard, with flashbacks to a murderous armed robbery that Robicheaux witnessed as a younger man, intermingled with contemporary murders and mayhem, somehow all of it being related. And of course it’s peopled by the usual collection of fascinating and strange characters, some of them homicidal, others ’stand up’, some a bit of both.

And his descriptions of New Iberia make you feel as though you are there - I have never been within 3000 miles of Louisiana but ……….

I’ve lunged into print here about this book because about 30 minutes ago I was reading it, and a chapter began -

“I woke at five-thirty the next morning to the sound of mockingbirds in the trees and a boat with a deep draft working its way downstream from the drawbridge at Burke street. Our home was a wonderful place to wake up on an early summer morning. Sometimes ground fog hung on the bayou, and inside it I would hear a gator slap its tail on the lily pads or a nutria or a muskrat roll off a cypress tree into the water. Sometimes I imagined I saw Confederate longboats, sharpshooters humped low inside, the oars muffled, floating silently with the current towards the Yankees’ skirmish line at Nelson’s Canal“.

To me, that’s poetry.

Random Cuts - Number 66

I’m scandalously ignorant of the vast majority of the recorded works of Aretha Franklin.

Of course, like everybody else, I’ve got a ‘greatest hits’ selection or two, and the phenomenal Rhino records re-issue of her jaw-droppingly brilliant 1967 LP ‘I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You‘.

But, I am regrettably quite unfamiliar with the many other albums released during her career, and it is a gap I’ve recently been trying to plug. In the last couple of days I’ve been listening to a double CD called ‘Rare and Unreleased Recordings‘ (issued by Rhino last year) which is so unutterably brilliant that it will knock your socks off and then put them back on again.

I simply dip into it and pull one of the tracks at random, and it’s bound to be a plum - the track here is one I’d never heard before, though it may be well known to Aretha fans - this recording was made in April 1972

- this is Aretha Franklin - This Is The Other Side Of The Sky

Random Cuts - Number 65

EASTER EVERYWHERE

Most of you will know straight away, just looking at the seasonal sub-title above, where we are going next.

If Wild Man Fischer was a single lunatic operating in a niche market, then the 13th Floor Elevators may well have been the full-blown asylum, with 5 regular inmates and a host of transients.

Lead loon was the errant creative genius and all-purpose headcase Roky Erickson (see Nick Kent’s ‘the dark stuff’ for the scary piece ‘The Bewildering Universe of Roky Erickson and his Two-Headed Dog’).

Roky’s history is of drug abuse (mainly LSD and mescaline), paranoid schizophrenia and forced electro-convulsive therapy. In many ways, his story has certain parallels with that of Syd Barrett, in respect that they were both psychedelic explorers who went too far, got lost, and couldn’t get back. In Roky’s case, the forces of law and order helped him well along the road to madness.

The Elevators, by dint of being in the vanguard of psychedelic music and their endorsement of drug use, were targeted by the police in their home state of Texas. In 1969, Erickson, who at that time was mildly schizophrenic and prone to minor psychotic episodes, was arrested for possession of one marijuana joint in Austin. Facing a ten year prison term in terms of the local draconian law, Erickson pled not guilty by reason of insanity, which proved to be a major mistake. He was first sent to the Austin State Hospital. After several escape attempts, he was sent to the Rusk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he was subjected to major electroconvulsive therapy and Thorazine treatments and held there until 1972.

When he was eventually released he was in a very fragile mental state indeed and has remained so ever since, though the most improbable of rock comebacks began on the night of March 19, 2005 at an Austin, Texas restaurant called Threadgill’s, when Roky played live there with a band, under the watchful eye of his younger brother who appears to have gradually recalled Roky to some sort of ‘normal’ life, albeit that he’s now 60 years old.

But let’s not dwell on these depressing matters. Instead, let’s go back 40 years to the 13th Floor Elevators second album, ‘Easter Everywhere’, which apart from being a real classic of punk psychedelia, also featured some terrific Erickson compositions, adorned, as almost always by the ultra-distinctive electric jug of Tommy Hall. They even had a hit single with the opening track ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’ - but the song I’ve chosen to feature here is the Erickson/Hall composition ‘She Lives In A Time of Her Own’.