VANCOUVER, B.C. - This article summarizes the evidence upon which to
hypothesize that the Asian Tsunami of December 26, 2004 (Boxing Day) may have
been caused by gravity waves which accompanied a gamma ray burst caused by
the explosion of a Neutron Star in the Constellation Saggitarius, some 45,000
light years from Earth. The article also summarizes analysis of whether
the December 26, 2004 event may be an indicator that a cyclical Galactic
Superwave event, recurrent every 13,000 and 26,000 years, is overdue and may
occur precipitously in the near term future. The Mayan Calendar's current
TUN, or organic unit of Galactic time, ends on December 21, 2012.
According to one analyst, "both our
species' recent history and that of the crust of our planet, have been both
gradual and catastrophic. However, the catastrophes are of first and most
immediate concern, since they relate to periodic "superwaves" or volleys of
cosmic rays from the Galactic Center itself. The Galactic Center is an
incredibly superdense region only about as big as the sphere enclosing Jupiter's
orbit: it is about 23,000 light-years away in the constellation of
Sagittarius."
Others analyze the 13,000 and 26,000 year cycles of the Galactic Superwaves
in the context of spiritual and prophetic
texts. Under the Mayan Calendar, this TUN, or organic unit of Galactic time
is scheduled to end and a new TUN is scheduled to begin on December 21,
2012. According to the "Prophetic" frame of perception, the December
26-27, 2005 Gravity Wave/Tsunami was a Warning that humanity
should move out of a permanent warfare economy into a peaceful, sustainable,
cooperative, Universe-oriented Space Age society, seeking to integrate with
Universe society.
This observor writes: "What could be coming from
the sky to earth that the Star People are symbolized above being in between?
There is only one thing, that even Plato said descends from the heavens after
long periods of time like a pestilence. It has a modern name, given by the
scientist that has researched this phenomena, Dr Paul LaViolette. It is called:
A Galactic
Superwave.
"Stanford had said years back: But there shall come a sign
that is a warning. This is related also, in part, to the energization of the
ionosphere of the earth. In it, or related to it, there shall appear an
"apparition" that will symbolize the way in which men have turned to materialism
and to selfishness - in a sense, to death. It shall symbolize the choice that is
represented in that recorded of old, "In this day I stand between the living and
the dead." That may be seen of all men. Still, by jaded mind, science shall be
inclined to dismiss it as natural events and phenomena. But it shall be
symbolic, in a sense, of the judgment of the earth, of the karmas, the
retribution to come in the earth, that is mind created. So then, science
misses the point behind the event?"
Read Source Article by James
Finn
In this light, the development of Exopolitics
at this juncture in human history seems fortuitous, "just in time." (See: EXOPOLITICS:
POLITICS, GOVERNMENT AND LAW IN THE UNIVERSE, available online at: http://www.filamentbookclub.com/)
The Exopolitics model postulates the Earth resides is a populated, organized
Universe, operating under Universal law, with forms of Universal governance, and
mediated by the processes of Universe politics amongst its constituent
civilizations. Exopolitics provides an institutional and educational
bridge for integrating Earth into Universe society. Is one central
reason for the outreach of the UFO phenomenon since 1947 to prepare human
society for this integration, knowing that the stress of a cyclical Galactic
Superwave event would occur by 2012, hypothetically? If there is any truth
to this hypothesis, then Exopolitics is the discipline that human society
requires to implement that integration - politically, socially, legally,
constitutionally, ethically, and Spiritually.
In fact solutions to the
ecological, social, and personal stress caused by phenomena such as global
warming and possible Galactic Superwaves may lie in an Exopolitical future, in
which we in human society decide to integrate other spiritually advanced
Off-Planet cultures now in the Earth's environment and willing to integrate with
us. Two specific programmes proposed by Exopolitics are (1) A Decade of
Contact in the form of an open period of public education, science, community
participation, and media/communications about our populated Universe and (2) A
Star Dreams Initiative for public interest diplomacy with Off-Planet Cultures
designed to establish the infrastructure for our integration into Universe
society.
It has not been determined to a certainty that Galactic Gravity
Waves caused the December 26, 2004 Tsunami and the many Earth Changes we are
witnessing at this time, and which are documented in this article. Nor do
we know for a certainty when any Galactic Superwave will strike with the next 10
years, be that on March 6, 2005, as one observor hypothesizes, or before
December 21, 2012, or even in this Century.
But we do know enough just in
the articles and Links set out
here that we must transform to a peaceful Space Age society. Is the
Galactic Superwave a form of the War Against the Asteroids, another strategic
deception operation to derail humanity away from transforming the permanent
warfare state? That is doubtful - The papers below are based on science,
and an Exopolitical strategy of reaching out to Universe society seems healthy,
sane, ethical and Agape-based, not a strategy based on deception.
Exopolitics.com
Vancouver,
B.C.
Galactic Core Explosions and their hazardous effects on the
Earth
http://www.etheric.com/GalacticCenter/Galactic.html
Cosmic
Explosion Among the Brightest in Recorded History
Exopolitics & A Galactic Superwave:
Host Clyde Lewis
interviews futurist Alfred Lambremont Webre, JD, MEd
EXOPOLITICS: POLITICS, GOVERNMENT AND
LAW IN THE UNIVERSE
Date: Sunday, March 13, 2005/ 10PM - 1 AM
PT
LISTEN ARCHIVES: http://www.clydelewis.com/
X-Zone
Radio, Host: Rob McConnell
Date: March 17, 2005
LISTEN ARCHIVES: http://www.xzone-radio.com/
The Life Work of Paul LaViolette
http://www.etheric.com/LaViolette/LaViolette.html
PAUL
A. LaVIOLETTE, PH.D, is author of The Talk of the Galaxy, Earth Under Fire,
Genesis of the Cosmos (Beyond the Big Bang), Subquantum Kinetics, and editor of
A Systems View of Man. He has also published many original papers in physics,
astronomy, climatology, systems theory, and psychology. He received his BA in
physics from Johns Hopkins, his MBA from the University of Chicago, and PhD from
Portland State University and is currently president of the Starburst
Foundation, an interdisciplinary scientific research institute.
Paul
LaViolette has an ongoing interest in metaphysics, mysticism, and
music.
He has served as a solar energy consultant for the UN, Greek
government, and Club of Rome Goals for Mankind Project and has also consulted
Fortune 500 companies on ways of stimulating innovation. Research he conducted
at Harvard School of Public Health led him to invent an improved pulsation
dampener for air sampling pumps. Related work led him to develop an improved
life-support rebreather apparatus for protection against hazardous environments
and for which he received two patents.
Recognized in the Marquis Who's Who in
Science and Engineering, Dr. LaViolette is the first to predict that high
intensity volleys of cosmic ray particles travel directly to our planet from
distant sources in our Galaxy, a phenomenon now confirmed by scientific data. He
is also the first to discover high concentrations of cosmic dust in Ice Age
polar ice, indicating the occurrence of a global cosmic catastrophe in ancient
times. Based on this work, he made predictions about the entry of interstellar
dust into the solar system ten years before its confirmation in 1993 by data
from the Ulysses spacecraft and by radar observations from New Zealand. He also
originated the glacier wave flood theory that not only provides a reasonable
scientific explanation for widespread continental floods, but also presents a
credible explanation for the sudden freezing of the arctic mammoths and demise
of the Pleistocene mammals. Also he developed a novel theory that links
geomagnetic flips to the past occurrence of immense solar flare storm
outbursts.
He is the developer of subquantum kinetics, a novel approach to microphysics
that not only accounts for electric, magnetic, gravitational, and nuclear forces
in a unified manner, but also resolves many long-standing problems in physics
such as the field singularity problem, the wave-particle dualism, and the field
source problem, to mention a few. Moreover based on the predictions of this
theory, he developed an alternative cosmology that effectively replaces the big
bang theory. In fact, in 1986, he was the first to cast doubt on the big bang
theory by showing that it makes a far poorer fit to existing astronomical data
when compared to this new non-expanding universe cosmology. The subquantum
kinetics cosmology also led him to make successful predictions about galaxy
evolution that were later verified with the Hubble Space Telescope.
Dr. LaViolette is credited with the discovery of the planetary-stellar
mass-luminosity relation which demonstrates that the Sun, planets, stars, and
supernova explosions are powered by spontaneous energy creation through photon
blueshifting. With this relation, he successfully predicted the mass-luminosity
ratio of the first brown dwarf to be discovered.
In addition, Paul LaViolette has developed a new theory of gravity that
replaces the deeply flawed theory of general relativity. Predicted from
subquantum kinetics, it accounts for the electrogravitic coupling phenomenon
discovered by Townsend Brown and may explain the advanced aerospace propulsion
technology utilized in the B-2 bomber.
He is the first to discover that certain ancient creation myths and esoteric
lores metaphorically encode an advanced science of cosmogenesis. His
contributions to the field of Egyptology and mythology may be compared to the
breaking of the Rosetta Stone hieroglyphic code.
Galactic Cosmic Ray Volleys: A Coming Global Disaster
http://www.etheric.com/GalacticCenter/Galactic.html
"Galactic
core outbursts are the most energetic phenomenon taking place in the universe.
The active, quasar-like core of spiral galaxy PG 0052+251 (Figure 1-a), for
example, is seen to radiate 7 times as much energy as comes from all of the
galaxy's stars. Most of this is emitted in the form of high energy cosmic ray
electrons accompanied by electromagnetic radiation ranging from radio wave
frequencies on up to X ray and gamma ray frequencies.
"A study of
astronomical and geological data reveals that cosmic ray electrons and
electromagnetic radiation from a similar outburst of our own Galactic core
(Figure 1-b), impacted our Solar System near the end of the last ice age. This
cosmic ray event spanned a period of several thousand years and climaxed around
14,200 years ago. Although far less intense than the PG 0052+251 quasar
outburst, it was, nevertheless, able to substantially affect the Earth's climate
and trigger a solar-terrestrial conflagration the initiated the worst animal
extinction episode of the Tertiary period.
"The effects on the Sun and on
the Earth's climate were not due to the Galactic cosmic rays themselves, but to
the cosmic dust that these cosmic rays transported into the Solar System.
Observations have shown that the Solar System is presently immersed in a dense
cloud of cosmic dust, material that is normally kept at bay by the outward
pressure of the solar wind. But, with the arrival of this Galactic cosmic ray
volley, the solar wind was overpowered and large quantities of this material
were pushed inward. The Sun was enveloped in a cocoon of dust that caused its
spectrum to shift toward the infrared. In addition, the dust grains filling the
Solar System scattered radiation back to the Earth, producing an "interplanetary
hothouse effect" that substantially increased the influx of solar radiation to
the Earth. Details of this scenario are described in Paul LaViolette's book
Earth Under Fire,(1) in his Ph.D. dissertation,(2) as well as in a series of
journal articles he has published.(38)
"LaViolette's research
suggests that the Sun also became highly active as dust and gas falling onto its
surface induced extreme flaring activity. Together with the radiation influx
from the Sun's dust cocoon, this caused the Sun's corona and photosphere to
inflate, much as is observed today in dust-choked stars called "T Tauri stars."
These various solar effects caused atmospheric warming and inversion conditions
that facilitated glacial growth which brought on ice age conditions. On
occasions when the solar radiation influx to the Earth became particularly high,
the ice age climate warmed, initiating episodes of rapid glacial melting and
continental flooding. There is evidence that one particularly tragic solar flare
event occurred around 12,750 years ago during a period when the Sun was
particularly active. This involved the release of an immense coronal mass
ejection which engulfed the Earth and induced a mass animal
extinction.
"Dr. LaViolette, who is currently president and chief
researcher of the Starburst Foundation, was the first to demonstrate that cosmic
rays from a galactic core explosion penetrate far outside a galaxy's nucleus to
bombard solar systems like our own residing in the spiral arm disk. He coined
the word "galactic superwave" to refer to such a cosmic barrage. He has shown
that galactic superwaves recur at long intervals and arrive at Earth's doorstep
without warning because they travel at near light speed.
"Galactic
superwaves are a recent discovery. During the early 60's astronomers began to
realize that the massive object that forms the core of our Galaxy (the Milky
Way), periodically becomes active.(9) The cores of all spiral galaxies cycle
through a similar phase. During its active period, our galactic core spews out a
fierce quasar-like barrages of cosmic rays, with a total energy output equal to
hundreds of thousands of supernova explosions.(10, 11) In some galaxies these
active emissions have been observed to equal the energy from billions of
supernova explosions.
"Until recently, astronomers believed these
eruptions were very infrequent, occurring every 10 to 100 million years.(10)
They also believed the interstellar magnetic fields, in the Galactic nucleus,
would trap the emitted particles in spiral orbits causing them to reach the
Earth very slowly.(12) For these reasons, many did not believe that Galactic
core explosions posed any immediate threat to the Earth.
"However, in
1983 Paul LaViolette presented evidence to the scientific community indicating
that:(2 - 4)
1. Galactic core explosions actually
occur about every 13,000 - 26,000 years for major outbursts and more frequently
for lesser events.
2. The emitted cosmic rays escape
from the core virtually unimpeded. As they travel radially outward through the
Galaxy, they form a spherical shell that advances at a velocity approaching the
speed of light.
"Astronomical discoveries subsequently confirmed aspects
of Dr. LaViolette's hypothesis. In 1985, astronomers discovered that Cygnus X-3,
an energetic celestial source of cosmic rays, which is about the same distance
from Earth as the Galactic Center (25,000 light years), is showering Earth with
particles, traveling at close to the speed of light, moving in essentially
straight paths.(13) Later, scientists found the Earth is impacted, at sporadic
intervals, with cosmic rays emitted from the X-ray pulsar Hercules X-1 (about
12,000 light years distant).(14, 15) The intervening interstellar medium has so
little effect on these particles, that their pulsation period of 1.2357 seconds,
is constant to within 300 microseconds.
"These findings are reason to be
gravely concerned about the effects of a Galactic core explosion because they
imply that the cosmic rays generated can impact our planet, virtually without
warning, preceded only by the wave-flash from the initial explosion.(1, 2, 6)
Astronomical observations show the last major Galactic core explosion occurred
as recently as 10,000 to 15,000 years ago.(16, 17) Data obtained from polar ice
core samples show evidence of this cosmic ray event as well as other cosmic ray
intensity peaks from earlier times (Figure 2).(1, 18)
"Also Dr.
LaViolette's prediction that there is a residual flow of interstellar dust
currently entering the Solar System from the Galactic center direction was later
verified by data collected from the Ulysses spacecraft and by AMOR radar
measurements made in New Zealand.(8)
For a listing of
related theory predictions and their verification click
here.
"Today, tomorrow, next week, next year. . . sometime in the
coming decades. . . our planet could once again be hit by an intense volley of
Galactic cosmic rays. It will come cloaked and hidden from us, until the very
moment it strikes. We live on the edge of the Galaxy's volcano. Knowing neither
the time, the magnitude, nor the severity of the next eruption or its impact on
our environment, we stand unprepared to deal with this event, much less
anticipate its arrival.
Galactic Superwaves: Their Effects on Life and
Society
"When cosmic rays from Galactic superwaves impact
the Earth's atmosphere, they produce "electron cascades." Each primary cosmic
ray generates millions of secondary high energy electrons. Many of these
particles scatter upwards and become trapped by the Earth's magnetic field to
form radiation belts similar to those created by high altitude nuclear
explosions. In just one day, a major Galactic superwave event would inject into
the geomagnetic field a particle energy equivalent to 1000 one-megaton hydrogen
bomb explosions (1025 ergs). At this rate, the energy delivered to the belts
after one year would exceed 30,000 times the energy received from the most
powerful solar cosmic ray storms observed in modern times.
"Such energized radiation belts could cause a global communications blackout by
creating radio static and by permanently damaging critical electronic components
of communication satellites. Air travel during such conditions would be
extremely hazardous. The resulting atmospheric ionization would destroy the
ozone layer, and increase skin cancer rates, due to high levels of UV reaching
the Earth's surface; the cosmic ray particles penetrating to ground level would
significantly increase cell mutation rates.
"Galactic superwaves
may also produce an intense electromagnetic pulse (EMP) whenever a cosmic ray
front happens to strike the Earth's atmosphere. Galactic superwaves such as
those that arrived during the last ice age could have generated pulses
delivering tens of thousands of volts per meter in times as short as a billionth
of a second, comparable to the early-time EMP signal from a high-altitude
nuclear explosion (see Figure 3).
"In addition, there is
the danger that a superwave could transport outlying cosmic dust into the Solar
System which could seriously affect the Earth's climate possibly triggering a
new ice age. Although there is a small probability that the next superwave will
be as catastrophic as the one at the end of the last ice age, even the less
intense, more frequent events would be quite hazardous for the global
economy.
The Frequency and Hazards of Minor Superwave
Events
Galactic Center activity occurs frequently between major
superwave events. Astronomical observation indicates that during the last 6,000
years, the Galactic center has expelled 14 clouds of ionized gas.(19) See Figure
4 for dates. These outbursts may have produced minor superwave emissions with
EMP effects comparable to those of major superwaves. About 80% of these bursts
took place within 500 hundred years of one another (Figure 5). With the most
recent outburst occurring 700 years ago, there is a high probability of another
one occurring in the near future.
The four-second
extragalactic gamma ray burst that arrived in 1983, did have a measurable effect
on radio transmissions used for global navigation and communication.(20) By
comparison, the "minor" superwave events discussed above might have total
energies hundreds of millions of times greater than this.
At
present little research is being done on this important astronomical phenomenon.
Nor are we prepared should a Galactic superwave suddenly arrive. International
channels of communication are not in place to deal with the disasters that a
superwave could bring upon us.
Steps that Should be
Taken
Currently, radio astronomers are monitoring the
cosmic ray/synchrotron radiation activity of the Galactic core on a daily basis.
They report their findings regularly in IAU (International Astronomical Union)
circulars. However, an early warning system needs to be set up so that, in the
event that signs of a significant core outburst and superwave activity are
detected, the proper organizations around the world are notified and the proper
precautions are taken. In this way, the impact of such an event could be
drastically reduced.
In regard to the superwave EMP
problem, there is a need to develop an awareness about this phenomenon so that
if it does occur, it does not inadvertently trigger a nuclear missile launching.
Also there is a need to develop emergency plans to implement measures that will
minimize its impact on power and communications networks.
There needs to be an increased awareness of the phenomenon and its potential
threat to the Earth so that ways might be found of minimizing the effects of a
superwave should one arrive. More scientific papers need to be presented on
research on this subject and media coverage of the subject is needed.
Astronomical and geological research needs to be conducted to learn more about
this phenomenon. For example, a more detailed analysis needs to be made of the
high concentrations of beryllium-10 and cosmic dust present in the ice age
portion of the Earth's polar ice record, remnants of the last major superwave
event. Data on interstellar dust composition that will be gathered with the
Cassini spacecraft will also be particularly useful.
Currently, the Starburst Foundation is one of the few organizations researching
this important astronomical phenomenon. The Starburst Foundation is a scientific
research institute dedicated to discovering how Galactic superwaves have
affected our planet in the past, to implementing an international early-warning
system for future events, and to investigating ways of lessening the adverse
effects of superwaves on our planet.
The Starburst
Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit U.S. corporation that is supported by
charitable contributions. Those interested in sending donations may make out a
check to the Starburst Foundation and send it to:
The
Starburst Foundation
1176 Hedgewood Lane
Niskayuna, NY 12309
email: Gravitics1@aol.com
References
1) LaViolette, P. A. Earth Under Fire. Alexandria, VA: Starlane
Publications, 1997.
2) LaViolette, P. A. Galactic Explosions,
Cosmic Dust Invasions, and Climatic Change. Ph.D. dissertation, Portland State
University, Portland, Oregon, August 1983.
3) LaViolette,
P. A. "The terminal Pleistocene cosmic event: Evidence for recent incursion of
nebular material into the Solar System." Eos 64 (1983): 286. American
Geophysical Union paper, Baltimore, Maryland.
4)
LaViolette, P. A. "Elevated concentrations of cosmic dust in Wisconsin stage
polar ice." Meteoritics 18 (1983): 336. Meteoritical Society paper, Mainz,
Germany.
5) LaViolette, P. A. "Evidence of high cosmic dust
concentrations in Late Pleistocene polar ice (20,000 - 14,000 Years BP)."
Meteoritics 20 (1985): 545.
6) LaViolette, P. A. "Cosmic
ray volleys from the Galactic Center and their recent impact on the Earth
environment." Earth, Moon, and Planets 37 (1987): 241.
7)
LaViolette, P. A. "Galactic core explosions and the evolution of life."
Anthropos 12, (1990): 239 255.
8) LaViolette, P. A.
"Anticipation of the Ulysses interstellar dust findings." Eos 74(44) (1993): 510
511.
9) Oort, J. H. "The Galactic Center." Annual
Reviews of Astronomy & Astrophysics 15 (1977): 295.
10)
Burbridge, G. R. et al. "Evidence for the occurrence of violent events in the
nuclei of galaxies." Reviews of Modern Physics 35 (1963): 947.
11) Burbidge, G. R. et al. "Physics of compact nonthermal sources III.
Energetic considerations." Astrophysical Journal 193 (1974): 43.
12) Ginzburg, V. L., and Syrovatskii, S. I. The Origin of Cosmic Rays.
New York: Pergamon Press, 1964, p. 207.
13) Marshak, et al.
"Evidence for muon production by particles from Cygnus X-3," Physical Review
Letters 54 (1985): 2079.
14) Dingus, B. L. et al. "High-energy
pulsed emission from Hercules X-1 with anomalous air-shower muon production."
Physical Review Letters 61 (1988): 1906.
15) Schwarzschild,
B. "Are the ultra-energetic cosmic gammas really photons? Physics Today (ll)
(1988): 17.
16) Brown, R. L., and Johnston, K. J. "The gas density
and distribution within 2 parsecs of the Galactic Center," Astrophysical Journal
268 (1983): L85.
17) Lo, K. Y., and Claussen, M. J.
"High-resolution observations of ionized gas in central 3 paresecs of the
Galaxy: possible evidence for infall." Nature 306 (1983): 647.
18)
Raisbeck, G. M., et al. "Evidence for two intervals of enhanced 10Be deposition
in Antarctic ice during the Last Glacial Period." Nature 326 (1987):
273.
19) Lacy, J. H., Townes, C. H., Geballe, T. R., and
Hollenbach, D. J. "Observations of the motion and distribution of the ionized
gas in the central parsec of the Galaxy. II," Astrophysical Journal 241 (1980):
132.
20) Fishman, G. J. and Inan, U. S. "Observation of an
ionospheric disturbance caused by a gamma-ray burst." Nature 331
(1988):418.
Copyright http://www.etheric.com/
Was the December 26, 2004 Indonesian Earthquake and Tsunami Caused by
a Stellar Explosion 45,000 Light Years Away? Sound Crazy? Read Carefully
Below.
http://www.etheric.com/GalacticCenter/GRB.html
Gamma
Ray Bursts, Gravity Waves, and Earthquakes
On December 26, 2004 a
magnitude 9.3 earthquake occurred in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Sumatra
in Malaysia. It caused a powerful tsunami which devastated coastal regions
of many countries leaving over 240,000 people either dead or missing. It
was the worst tsunami to affect this area since the explosion of Krakatoa.
The earthquake that produced it was so strong that it exceeded by a factor of 10
the next most powerful earthquake to occur in the past 25 years.
•
Indonesian 9.3 Richter earthquake:
December 26, 2004 at
00 hours 58 minutes (Universal Time)
It is then with some alarm that we
learn that just 44.6 hours later gamma ray telescopes orbiting the Earth picked
up the arrival of the brightest gamma ray burst ever recorded!
• Gamma
ray burst arrival:
December 27, 2004 at 21 hours 36
minutes (Universal Time)
This gamma ray blast was 100 times more intense
than any burst that had been previously recorded, equaling the brightness of the
full Moon, but radiating most of its energy at gamma ray wavelengths.
Gamma ray counts spiked to a maximum in 1.5 seconds and then declined over a 5
minute period with 7.57 second pulsations. The blast temporarily changed
the shape the Earth's ionosphere, distorting the transmission of long-wavelength
radio signals. See stories on Space.com, BBC News, NY TImes.
It was determined that the burst originated from the soft gamma ray
repeater star, SGR 1806-20, a neutron star 20 kilometers in diameter which
rotates once every 7.5 seconds, matching the GRB pulsation period. SGR
1806-20 is located about 10 degrees northeast of the Galactic center and about
45,000 light years from us, or about twice as far away as the Galactic
center. It released more energy in a tenth of a second than the Sun emits
in 100,000 years. Other gamma ray bursts have been detected whose explosions
were intrinsically more powerful than this one at the source of the explosion,
but since those explosions originated in other galaxies tens of thousands of
times more distant, the bursts were not nearly as bright when they reached our
solar system. What makes the December 27th gamma ray burst unique is that
it is the first time that a burst this bright has been observed, one that also
happens to originate from within our own Galaxy.
Astronomers have theorized that gamma ray bursts might travel in association
with gravity wave bursts. In the course of their flight through space, gamma
rays would be deflected by gravitational fields and would be scattered by dust
and cosmic ray particles they encountered, so they would be expected to travel
slightly slower than their associated gravity wave burst which would pass
through space unimpeded. After a 45,000 year light-speed journey, a gamma
ray burst arrival delay of 44.6 hours would not be unexpected. It amounts
to a delay of just one part in 9 million. So if the gravity wave traveled
at the speed of light (c), the gamma ray burst would have averaged a speed of
0.99999989 c, just 0.11 millionths slower. There is also the possibility
that at the beginning of its journey the gravity wave may have had a
superluminal speed; see textbox below.
The 9.3 Richter earthquake was ten
times stronger than any other earthquake during the past 25 years, and was
followed just 44.6 hours later on December 27th by a very intense gamma ray
burst, which was 100 fold brighter than any other in the past 25 year history of
gamma ray observation. It seems difficult to pass off the temporal proximity of
these two Class I events as being just a matter of coincidence. A time
period of 25 years compared to a time separation of 44.6 hours amounts to a time
ratio of about 5000:1. For two such unique events to have such a close
time proximity is highly improbable if they are not somehow related. But,
as mentioned above, gravity waves would very likely be associated with gamma ray
bursts, and they would be expected to precede them.
Many
have inquired if there might be a connection between these two events (e.g., see
the Space.com article). Not thinking of the gravity wave connection,
astronomers have been reluctant to admit there might be a connection since they
know of no mechanism by which gamma rays by themselves could trigger
earthquakes. They admit that the December 27th gamma ray burst had
slightly affected the ionization state of the Earth's atmosphere, but this by
itself should not have caused earthquakes. However, if a longitudinal
gravity potential wave pulse were to accompany a gamma ray burst, the mystery
becomes resolved. The connection between earthquakes and gamma ray bursts
now becomes plausible.
In his 1983 Ph.D.
dissertation, Paul LaViolette called attention to terrestrial dangers of
Galactic core explosions, pointing out that the arrival of the cosmic ray
superwave they produced would be signaled by a high intensity gamma ray burst
which would also generate EMP effects (e.g., see Page 3). He also
noted that a strong gravity wave might be expected to travel forward at the
forefront of this superwave and might be the first indication of a superwave's
arrival. He pointed out that such gravity waves could induce substantial
tidal forces on the Earth during their passage which could induce earthquakes
and cause polar axis torquing effects. In his book Earth Under Fire
(as well as in his dissertation), he presents evidence showing that the
superwave that passed through the solar system around 14,200 years ago had
triggered supernova explosions as it swept through the Galaxy. Among these
were the Vela and Crab supernova explosions whose explosion dates align with
this superwave event horizon. He points out that these explosions could be
explained if a gravity wave accompanied this superwave, it could have produced
tidal forces which could have triggered unstable stars to explode as it passed
through.
He wrote at a time when gamma ray
bursts had just begun to be discovered, and when no one was concerned with them
as potential terrestrial hazards. In recent years scientific opinion has
come around to adopt LaViolette's concern, as can be seen in news articles
discussing the SGR 1806-20 gamma ray outburst, e.g., see Space.com news
story. They note that if this gamma ray burst had been as close as 10
light years it would have completely destroyed the ozone layer. By
comparison, the Galactic superwaves LaViolette has postulated to have been
generated as a result of an outburst of our Galaxy's core and to have impacted
the Solar system during the last ice age would have impacted the solar system
with a cosmic ray electron volley having an energy intensity 100 times greater
than this hypothetical 10 light year distant stellar gamma ray burst. In
comparision, SGR 1806-20 has been estimated to have a stellar progenitor mass of
150 solar masses, whereas our Galactic core has a mass of 2.6 million solar
masses. In its present active phase, SGR 1806-20 is estimated to have a
luminosity 40 million times that of the Sun, whereas during its active phase the
Galactic center could reach luminosities of 400 trillion times that of the
Sun. So it is understandable that if the Galactic center were to
erupt, it would produce a gamma ray burst and a gravity wave far more intense
than the outburst from this star.
If anything, the
December 27, 2004 gamma ray burst shows us that we do not live in a peaceful
celestial environment. And if the December 26th earthquake was in fact
part of this same celestial event, we see that this stellar eruption has claimed
many lives. For this reason, it is important that we prepare for the
possibility of even stronger events in the future, the arrival of superwaves
issuing from the core of our Galaxy. Like the December 26th earthquake and
the December 27th gamma ray burst, the next superwave will arrive
unexpectedly. It will take us by surprise.
As a next step, it is
advisable to investigate data from gravity wave telescopes to see if a celestial
gravity wave may have arrived immediately prior to the December 26, 2004
earthquake. Since seismic waves from the Indonesian earthquake would have
taken some time to propagate through the Earth to these gravity wave antenna,
their signature could be distinguished from the gravity wave coming from SGR
1806-20. LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravity Wave Observatory), which
consists of two correlated telescopes, one in Washington and one in Louisiana,
each having a 4 kilometer long laser interferometer beam path, was in the
process of being made operational and unfortunately was not collecting data at
that time. The TAMA gravity wave antenna in Japan may have been
operational during the December time period however they apparently do not
answer telephone calls and have no posted email address. So it has
not been possible to contact their scientific team.
Superwave Monitoring
Center
Those interested in monitoring earthquake, gamma ray
burst, cosmic ray background activity, and gravity wave bursts may try the
following websites:
• Current earthquakes:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/recenteqsww/Quakes/quakes_all.html
• Past
earthquakes:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/activity/past.htmlpast.html
• Gamma ray
bursts: http://grad40.as.utexas.edu/grblog.php?author=D.%20Gotz
•
Cosmic ray radiation intensity:
http://cr0.izmiran.rssi.ru/mosc/main.htm
• Gravity wave bursts
(LIGO site: no posted data, just posted papers):
http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/ and
http://www.ligo.org/results/
The December 27th GRB was not accompanied by
any rise in the cosmic ray background, indicating that if it was accompanied by
cosmic rays their intensity was unable to exceed the relatively constant
extragalactic background flux arriving from distant galaxies. A Galactic
superwave, on the other hand, would most likely produce a substantial rise in
these levels.
Note that almost two months passed before the
December 27th gamma ray burst found its way into news media stories. If
unusually intense activity were to occur in the near future as the beginning
stages of a superwave arrival, it is hoped that scientists will not keep this
knowledge to themselves but rather allow the global news media to disseminate
the story quickly to inform the world.
A Superluminal Gravity
Wave?
Experiments carried out by Eugene Podkletnov show that a shock
front outburst produces a longitudinal gravitational wave that travels forward
with the burst. He has found that this gravity wave pulse has a speed in
excess of 64 times the speed of light (personal communication). Also Guy
Obolensky has produced spark discharge electric potential shock fronts and
observed them to propagate forward at speeds as high as 10 times the speed of
light. Observations suggest that the gravity wave from an expanding
stellar explosion will decrease its superluminal speed and eventually approach
the speed of light as the shock front expands. But meanwhile, the gravity
wave will have obtained a headstart over the electromagnetic wave radiation
component traveling in its wake (light waves, gamma rays, etc.). So one
would expect that the gravity wave from such an outburst (and its resultant
earthquake activity) would precede the gamma ray burst component.
Nine
(9) Alternative Frames of Analysis
http://www.ecologynews.com/ecologynews103.html
NEWS
ARTICLES: Neutron Star Explosion Detected December 27, 2004
Brightest Explosion Ever Recorded
NASA -- Scientists have detected a flash of light from across the Galaxy so
powerful that it bounced off the Moon and lit up the Earth's upper atmosphere.
The flash was brighter than anything ever detected from beyond our Solar System
and lasted over a tenth of a second.
NASA and European satellites and many
radio telescopes detected the flash and its aftermath on December 27, 2004. Two
science teams report about this event at a special press event today at NASA
headquarters. A multitude of papers are planned for publication.
The
scientists said the light came from a "giant flare" on the surface of an exotic
neutron star, called a magnetar. The apparent magnitude was brighter than a full
moon and all historical star explosions. The light was brightest in the
gamma-ray energy range, far more energetic than visible light or X-rays and
invisible to our eyes.
Such a close and powerful eruption raises the question of whether an even
larger influx of gamma rays, disturbing the atmosphere, was responsible for one
of the mass extinctions known to have occurred on Earth hundreds of millions of
years ago. Also, if giant flares can be this powerful, then some gamma-ray
bursts (thought to be very distant black-hole-forming star explosions) could
actually be from neutron star eruptions in nearby galaxies.
NASA's newly
launched Swift satellite and the NSF-funded Very Large Array (VLA) were two of
many observatories that observed the event, arising from neutron star SGR
1806-20, about 50,000 light years from Earth in the constellation
Sagittarius.
"This might be a once-in-a-lifetime event for astronomers, as well as for the
neutron star," said Dr. David Palmer of Los Alamos National Laboratory, lead
author on a paper describing the Swift observation. "We know of only two other
giant flares in the past 35 years, and this December event was one hundred times
more powerful."
Dr. Bryan Gaensler of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., is lead author on a report describing the VLA
observation, which tracked the ejected material as it flew out into interstellar
space. Other key scientific teams are associated with radio telescopes in
Australia, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, India and the United States, as well
as with NASA's High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI).
A neutron star is the core remains of a star once several times more massive
than our Sun. When such stars deplete their nuclear fuel, they explode -- an
event called a supernova. The remaining core is dense, fast-spinning, highly
magnetic, and only about 15 miles in diameter. Millions of neutron stars fill
our Milky Way galaxy.
Scientists have discovered about a dozen
ultrahigh-magnetic neutron stars, called magnetars. The magnetic field around a
magnetar is about 1,000 trillion gauss, strong enough to strip information from
a credit card at a distance halfway to the moon. (Ordinary neutron stars measure
a mere trillion gauss; the Earth's magnetic field is about 0.5 gauss.)
Four of these magnetars are also called soft gamma repeaters, or SGRs,
because they flare up randomly and release gamma rays. Such episodes release
about 10^30 to 10^35 watts for about a second, or up to millions of times more
energy than our Sun. For a tenth of a second, the giant flare on SGR 1806-20
unleashed energy at a rate of about 10^40 watts. The total energy produced was
more than the Sun emits in 150,000 years.
"The next biggest flare ever seen
from any soft gamma repeater was peanuts compared to this incredible December 27
event," said Gaensler. "Had this happened within 10 light years of us, it would
have severely damaged our atmosphere. Fortunately, all the magnetars we know of
are much farther away than this."
A scientific debate raged in the 1980s over whether gamma-ray bursts were
star explosions from beyond our Galaxy or eruptions on nearby neutron stars. By
the late 1990s it became clear that gamma-ray bursts did indeed originate very
far away and that SGRs were a different phenomenon. But the extraordinary giant
flare on SGR 1806-20 reopens the debate, according to Dr. Chryssa Kouveliotou of
NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, who took part in both the Swift and VLA
analysis.
A sizeable percentage of "short" gamma-ray bursts, less than two
seconds, could be SGR flares, she said. These would come from galaxies within
about a 100 million light years from Earth. (Long gamma-ray bursts appear to be
black-hole-forming star explosions billions of light years away.)
"An answer to the 'short' gamma-ray burst mystery could come any day now that
Swift is in orbit", said Swift lead scientist Neil Gehrels. "Swift saw this
event after only about a month on the job."
Scientists around the world have
been following the December 27 event. RHESSI detected gamma rays and X-rays from
the flare. Drs. Kevin Hurley and Steven Boggs of the University of California,
Berkeley, are leading the effort to analyze these data. Dr. Robert Duncan of the
University of Texas at Austin and Dr. Christopher Thompson at the Canadian
Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (University of Toronto) are the leading
experts on magnetars, and they are investigating the "short duration" gamma-ray
burst relationship.
Brian Cameron, a graduate student at Caltech under the tutorage of Prof. Shri
Kulkarni, leads a second scientific paper based on VLA data. Amateur astronomers
detected the disturbance in the Earth's ionosphere and relayed this information
through the American Association of Variable Star Observers.
Videos and
Animations
1) Artist conception of the December 27, 2004 gamma ray flare
expanding from SGR 1806-20 and impacting Earth's atmosphere. Click here to watch
video.
2) An artist conception of the SGR 1806-20 magnetar including magnetic
field lines. After the initial flash, smaller pulsations in the data suggest hot
spots on the rotating magnetar's surface. The data also shows no change in the
magentar's rotation after the initial flash. Click here to watch video.
3)
Radio data shows a very active area around SGR1806-20. The Very Large Array
radio telescope observed ejected material from this Magnetar as it flew out into
interstellar space. These observations in the radio wavelength start about 7
days after the flare and continue for 20 days. They show SGR1806-20 dimming in
the radio spectrum. Click here to watch video.
4) SGR-1806 is an
ultra-magnetic neutron star, called a magnetar, located about 50,000 light years
away from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius. Click here to watch
video.
5) Swift is a first-of-its-kind multi-wavelength observatory dedicated
to the study of gamma ray burst (GRB) science. Its three instruments will work
together to observe GRBs and afterglows in the gamma ray, X-ray, ultraviolet,
and optical wavebands. Swift is designed to solve the 35-year-old mystery of the
origin of gamma-ray bursts. Scientists believe GRB are the birth cries of black
holes. Click here to watch video.
6) NASA's Swift satellite was successfully
launched Saturday, November 20, 2004 from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station,
Fla. Click here to watch video.
Other observatories and scientific representatives include:
Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope, Netherlands -- Prof. Ralph
Wijers
http://www.astron.nl/p/observing.htm
Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (MOST), Australia -- Prof. Dick
Hunstead
http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/astrop/most/
Australia Telescope Compact Array -- Prof. Bryan
Gaensler
http://www.narrabri.atnf.csiro.au/
Parkes radio telescope, Australia -- Dr. Maura
McLaughlin
http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/
Greenbank Radio Telescope, West Virginia -- Dr. Maura
McLaughlin
http://www.gb.nrao.edu/
Very Long Baseline Array, USA -- Dr. Mike
Garrett
http://www.vlba.nrao.edu/
Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network (MERLIN), UK -- Dr. Rob
Fender
http://www.merlin.ac.uk/
Additional information about magentars and soft gamma ray repeaters can be
found at Dr. Robert Duncan's web site located at the University of Texas at
Austin: http://solomon.as.utexas.edu/~duncan/magnetar.html
Story from
REDNOVA NEWS:
http://www.rednova.com/news/display/...
Published: 2005/02/18 13:55:00 CST
© Rednova 2004
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050214//full/050214-18.html
News
Published
online: 18 February 2005; | doi:10.1038/news050214-18
Huge explosion traced to exotic star
Jim
Giles
Astronomers pinpoint source of unprecedented radiation surge.
The
rotating, highly-magnetised neutron star undergoing a 'quake' at its surface.
Click here to see animation.
A cataclysmic 'starquake' is thought to have
caused a flare of radiation that ripped past the Earth on 27 December, battering
instruments on satellites and lighting up our atmosphere.
Scientists say this
is the biggest blast of gamma and X-rays they have ever observed in our corner
of the Universe. They believe the flare came from a bizarre object just 20
kilometres wide on the other side of the Galaxy.
"This is a
once-in-a-lifetime event," says Rob Fender of Southampton University, UK, one of
the researchers studying data on the flare. "The object released more energy in
a tenth of a second than the Sun emits in 100,000 years."
Data from
satellites and ground-based telescopes have pinpointed the origin of the burst
as SGR 1806-20, a 'magnetar' around 50,000 light-years away in the constellation
of Sagittarius. Magnetars are extremely dense, small stars with magnetic fields
at least a thousand trillion times stronger than the Earth's. They are a type of
neutron star, the compact remnant of a collapsed sun.
Astronomically
speaking, this was in our backyard.
Bryan Gaensler, Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics
The flare may have been caused by a quake on the
surface of SGR 1806-20, suggest researchers. The quake would have disturbed the
star's magnetic field, creating an explosion that was the brightest ever
detected beyond our Solar System.
It is possible that similar flares have
been misinterpreted in the past. Analogous gamma ray bursts have been detected,
but they were assumed to come from very distant objects beyond our galaxy.
A
satellite launched last November is ideally positioned to resolve the issue.
NASA's Swift Gamma Ray Burst Mission is designed to locate and measure bursts.
"Answers to these questions could come any day now that Swift is in orbit," says
Neil Gehrels of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
Safe
distance
Fortunately for life on Earth, the nearest known magnetar is about
13,000 light years away - too far for any future burst to damage the planet. The
radiation burst from a closer explosion could, for example, wipe out the ozone
layer.
"Astronomically speaking, this was in our backyard," says Bryan
Gaensler of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and an author of a paper about the burst that has been accepted
for publication in Nature. "If it were in our living room, we'd be in big
trouble."
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/gamma-05b.html
Blast
Affected Earth From Halfway Across The Milky Way
Cambridge MA (SPX) Feb 21, 2005
Forget "Independence Day" or "War of the
Worlds." A monstrous cosmic explosion last December showed that the earth is in
more danger from real-life space threats than from hypothetical alien
invasions.
The gamma-ray flare, which briefly outshone the full moon,
occurred within the Milky Way galaxy. Even at a distance of 50,000 light-years,
the flare disrupted the earth's ionosphere. If such a blast happened within 10
light-years of the earth, it would destroy the much of the ozone layer, causing
extinctions due to increased radiation.
"Astronomically speaking, this
explosion happened in our backyard. If it were in our living room, we'd be in
big trouble!" Said Bryan Gaensler (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics),
lead author on a paper describing radio observations of the event.
Gaensler
headed one of two teams reporting on this eruption at a special press event
today at NASA headquarters. A multitude of papers are planned for
publication.
The giant flare detected on December 27, 2004, came from an
isolated, exotic neutron star within the Milky Way. The flare was more powerful
than any blast previously seen in our galaxy.
"This might be a
once-in-a-lifetime event for astronomers, as well as for a neutron star," said
David Palmer of Los Alamos National Laboratory, lead author on a paper
describing space-based observations of the burst.
"We know of only two other
giant flares in the past 35 years, and this December event was one hundred times
more powerful."
NASA's newly launched Swift satellite and the NSF-funded Very
Large Array (VLA) were two of many observatories that observed the event,
arising from neutron star SGR 1806-20, about 50,000 light years from Earth in
the constellation Sagittarius.
Neutron stars form from collapsed stars. They
are dense, fast-spinning, highly magnetic, and only about 15 miles in diameter.
SGR 1806-20 is a unique neutron star called a magnetar, with an ultra-strong
magnetic field capable of stripping information from a credit card at a distance
halfway to the Moon. Only about 10 magnetars are known among the many neutrons
stars in the Milky Way.
"Fortunately, there are no magnetars anywhere near
the earth. An explosion like this within a few trillion miles could really ruin
our day," said graduate student Yosi Gelfand (CfA), a co-author on one of the
papers.
The magnetar's powerful magnetic field generated the gamma-ray flare
in a violent process known as magnetic reconnection, which releases huge amounts
of energy. The same process on a much smaller scale creates solar
flares.
"This eruption was a super-super-super solar flare in terms of energy
released," said Gaensler.
Using the VLA and three other radio telescopes,
Gaensler and his team detected material ejected by the blast at a velocity
three-tenths the speed of light. The extreme speed, combined with the close-up
view, yielded changes in a matter of days.
Spotting such a nearby gamma-ray
flare offered scientists an incredible advantage, allowing them to study it in
more detail than ever before. "We can see the structure of the flare's
aftermath, and we can watch it change from day to day. That combination is
completely unprecedented," said Gaensler.
Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass.,
the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration
between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College
Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the
origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe.
http://www.newscientist.com/
Distant
explosion breaks brightness records
• 19:00 18 February 2005
• NewScientist.com news service
• Maggie
McKee
Several dozen satellites around Earth, and one orbiting Mars, detected
a flash of high-energy photons - known as gamma rays - on 27 December 2004. The
0.25-second flash was so bright it overwhelmed the detectors on many satellites
- making an energy measurement impossible - and disrupted some radio
communication on Earth.
"It was so bright, it came right through the body of
the Swift satellite, even though Swift wasn't pointed at the object," says John
Nousek, mission director for NASA's Swift spacecraft - launched especially to
detect gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) - at Pennsylvania State University, US.
The
brief flash was followed by a fainter afterglow of gamma rays lasting for about
500 seconds, which showed a recurring signal every 7.5 seconds. That signal led
scientists using Europe's INTEGRAL spacecraft to trace the source of the
"superflare" to a dead star - called a neutron star - known to spin at that
rate. Measurements of the distance to the star - called SGR 1806-20, range from
30,000 to 50,000 light years from Earth.
That relatively small distance,
coupled with an accurate energy measurement by NASA's RHESSI satellite, means
the explosion was not as powerful - at source - as more distant bursts linked
with black holes. Nevertheless, it "may have sterilised any planets within a few
light years of it", says Rob Fender, an astronomer at Southampton University,
UK, who is studying the lingering radio emission from the flare. "This may be a
once-in-a-lifetime event both for astronomers and for the neutron star
itself."
Clean credit card
But Christopher Thompson, an astrophysicist at
the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Physics, says that may not be so. The
neutron star in question is rare magnetar, with a magnetic field so strong it
could wipe a credit card clean from a distance of 160,000 kilometres. And this
magnetar is even rarer yet, one of three "soft gamma repeaters" (SGRs) in the
Milky Way.
SGRs tend to release low-energy flares of gamma rays sporadically,
but more energetic bursts have been observed twice before - in 1998 and 1979.
But the energy in the initial 0.25-second burst from the most recent flare was
100 times that of the two previous superflares.
But Thompson, who worked on
the most accepted magnetar model, says: "I wasn't shocked at the energy it was
putting out. The total energy implied by the models is enough to power a dozen
or more of these events in the life of one magnetar."
Superflares may occur
when tightly wrapped magnetic fields inside the magnetar start to "untwist".
This briefly rips loose some magnetic fields outside the star, releasing a
"fireball" of particles, and light that astronomers see as a bright flash of
gamma rays.
Extreme distances
If this flare had been even farther away -
up to 100 million light years or so - it would have looked "indistinguishable"
from a short GRB - a cosmic phenomenon that has baffled astronomers for years.
Short GRBs are blasts of high-energy gamma rays that last less than two seconds.
Astronomers are unsure of their cause but think they have a different origin
than "long" GRBs - lasting for several seconds or minutes - which are thought to
be created during the birth of black holes.
This latest observation leads
David Palmer, a Swift team member at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New
Mexico, US, to say: "I'm fairly confident that soft gamma repeaters account for
at least some short gamma-ray bursts."
Neil Gehrels, principal investigator
for Swift at NASA, says Swift should be able to help settle the debate about
short GRBs. Swift will study both SGRs and short GRBs, having the capability to
quickly respond to short GRBs in order to locate them in space.
But he
laments: "It's very unlikely we're going to see another one of these supergiant
flares."
Related Articles
• Massive exploding stars create rare
magnetars
• http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns...
• 05 February
2005
• Swift mission sees its first gamma ray bursts
•
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns...
• 07 January 2005
• Superbright
gamma ray burst may be closest ever
•
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns...
• 04 April 2003
Weblinks
•
Swift, NASA
• http://swift.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/swift/swiftsc.html
•
INTEGRAL, ESA
•
http://astro.estec.esa.nl/SA-general/Projects/Integral/integral.html
•
RHESSI, NASA
• http://hesperia.gsfc.nasa.gov/hessi/
http://www.able2know.com/forums/about45952.html
AFP
Monster
star burst was brighter than full Moon: astronomers
Fri Feb 18, 2005
2:40 pm
PARIS (AFP) - Stunned astronomers described the greatest cosmic
explosion ever monitored -- a star burst from the other side of the galaxy that
was briefly brighter than the full Moon and swamped satellites and
telescopes.
The high-radiation flash, detected last December 27, caused no harm to Earth
but would have literally fried the planet had it occurred within a few light
years of home.
Normally reserved skywatchers struggled for superlatives.
"This is a once-in-a-lifetime event," said Rob Fender of Britain's
Southampton University.
"We have observed an object only 20 kilometers (12 miles) across, on the
other side of our galaxy, releasing more energy in a 10th of a second than the
Sun emits in 100,000 years."
"It was the mother of all magnetic flares -- a true monster," said Kevin
Hurley, a research physicist at the University of California at Berkeley.
Bryan Gaensler of the United States' Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics, described the burst as "maybe a once per century or once per
millennium event in our galaxy.
"Astronomically speaking, this explosion happened in our backyard. If it were
in our living room, we'd be in big trouble."
The blast was caused by an eruption on the surface of a known, exotic kind of
neutron star called SGR 1806-20, located about 50,000 light years from Earth in
the constellation of Sagittarius and about three billion times farther from us
than the Sun.
A neutron star is the remnant of a very large star near the end of its life
-- a tiny, extraordinarily dense core with a powerful magnetic field, spinning
swiftly on its axis.
When these ancient star cores finally run out of fuel, they collapse in on
themselves and explode as a supernova.
There are millions of neutron stars in the Milky Way but, so far, only a
dozen have been found to be "magnetars": neutron stars with an ultra-powerful
magnetic field.
Magnetars have have a magnetic field measuring about 1,000 trillion gauss,
hundreds of times more powerful than that of any other object in the
Universe.
To give an idea of this in earthly terms, the field is so powerful that it
could strip the data off a credit card at a distance of 200,000 kilometers
(120,000 miles).
SGR 1806-20 is an even rarer bird. It is one of only four known "soft gamma
repeater" (SGR) magnetars, so called because they flare up randomly and release
gamma rays in a mammoth burst.
Why this happens is unknown. One theory is that the energy release comes from
magnetic fields which wrestle and overlap because of the star's spin and then
snap back and reconnect, creating a "starquake" rather like the competing faults
that cause an earthquake.
What is sure, though, is that the outpouring of energy is massive.
The SGR 1806-20 spewed out about 10,000 trillion trillion watts, or about 100
times brighter than any of the several "giant flares" that have been previously
recorded.
Despite this energy loss, the strange star did not even pause, Britain's
Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) said.
"SGR 1806-20 spins once in only 7.5 seconds. Amazingly, the December 27 event
did not cause any slowing of its spin rate, as would be expected," the RAS
said.
The flare, detected by satellites and telescopes operated by NASA (news - web
sites) and Europe, was so powerful that it bounced off the Moon and lit up the
Earth's upper atmosphere. For over a tenth of the second, it was actually
brighter than a full Moon, and briefly overwhelmed delicate sensors, RAS
said.
Two science teams, formed by observations provided by 20 institutes around
the world, will report on the blast in a forthcoming issue of the British weekly
journal Nature.
Many questions will be thrown up by the event, including the intriguing
speculation that the dinosaurs may have been wiped out by a similar, closer
gamma-ray explosion 65 million years ago, and not by climate change inflicted by
an asteroid impact.
"Had this happened within 10 light years of us, it would have severly damaged
our atmosphere and possibly have triggered a mass extinction," said lead-author
Gaensler.
The good news, he noted, is that the nearest known magnetar to Earth, 1E
2259+586, is about 13,000 light years away.
http://mcdonaldobservatory.org/news/releases/2005/0218.html
18
February 2005
Magnetar flare blitzed Earth Dec. 27, could solve
cosmic mysteries
This information is co-released with The
University of California, Berkeley, and co-incides with a NASA Space Science
Update (right).
Austin, Texas — Astronomers around the world recorded late last year a
powerful explosion of high-energy X-rays and gamma rays — a split-second flash
from the other side of our galaxy that was strong enough to affect the Earth's
atmosphere. The flash, called a soft gamma repeater flare, reached Earth on Dec.
27 and was detected by at least 15 satellites and spacecraft between Earth and
Saturn, swamping most of their detectors.
Thought to be a mighty cataclysm in
a super-dense, highly magnetized star called a magnetar, it emitted as much
energy in two-tenths of a second as the sun gives off in 250,000 years. Robert
C. Duncan of the University of Texas at Austin originally proposed and developed
the magnetar theory, along with Christopher Thompson of the Canadian Institute
of Theoretical Astrophysics.
"This is a key event for understanding
magnetars," Duncan said. Its intrinsic power was a thousand times greater than
the power of all other stars in the galaxy put together, and at least 100 times
the power of any previous magnetar outburst in our galaxy. It was ten thousand
times brighter than the brightest supernova.
Duncan and Thompson worked with
Kevin Hurley, a research physicist at UC Berkeley who leads a major
international team studying the event, to understand the immense power of the
Dec. 27 flare. "It was the mother of all magnetic flares - a true monster,"
Hurley said.
The team's observations and analysis are summarized in a paper
that has been submitted for publication in the journal Nature.
"Soft gamma
repeater" bursts — pinpoint flashes of highly energetic X-rays and low-energy
(soft) gamma rays coming repeatedly from one place in the sky — were first
noticed in 1979 and remained a mystery until Duncan and Thompson proposed in
1992 that they originate from magnetically powered neutron stars, or magnetars.
Formed by the collapsing core of a star throwing off its outer layers in a
supernova explosion, neutron stars are extremely dense, with more mass than in
the Sun packed into a ball about 10 miles across. Many neutron stars spin
rapidly. These spinning neutron stars, some rotating a thousand times a second,
signal their presence by the emission of pulsed radio waves, and are called
pulsars.
According to Duncan, magnetars are a special kind of neutron star.
They are born rotating very quickly, which causes their magnetic fields to get
amplified. But after a few thousand years, their intense magnetic field slows
their spin to a more moderate period of one rotation every few seconds. The
magnetic fields both inside and outside the star twist, however, and according
to the theory these intense fields can stress and move the crust much like
shearing along the San Andreas Fault. These magnetic fields are a quadrillion —
a million billion — times stronger than the field that deflects compass needles
at the Earth's surface.
The shear moves the crust around and the magnetic
fields are tied to the crust, generating twists in the magnetic field that can
sometimes break and reconnect in a process that sends trapped positrons and
electrons flying out from the star, annihilating each other in a gigantic
explosion of hard gamma rays.
The flare observed Dec. 27 originated about
50,000 light years away in the constellation Sagittarius, which means that the
magnetar sits directly opposite the center of our galaxy from the Earth in the
disk of the Milky Way Galaxy.
As the radiation stormed through our solar
system, it blitzed at least 15 spacecraft, knocking their instruments off-scale
whether or not they were pointing in the magnetar's direction. One Russian
satellite, Coronas-F, detected gamma rays that had bounced off the Moon.
The
flare also ripped atoms apart, ionizing them, in much of the Earth's ionosphere
for five minutes, to a deeper level than even the biggest solar flares do, an
effect noticed via its effect on long-wavelength radio communications. Such
events are unlikely to pose a danger to the Earth because the chances that one
would be close enough to the Earth to cause serious disruption are exceedingly
small.
Hurley and his team combined information from many spacecraft,
including neutron and gamma-ray detectors aboard Mars Odyssey and many
near-Earth satellites, in order to localize it to a spot well-known to
astronomers: a magnetar known as SGR 1806-20. This position was accurately
confirmed by radio astronomers at the Very Large Array in Socorro, N.M., who
studied the fading radio afterglow of the event and obtained important
information about the explosion.
The tremendous power of the event has
suggested a novel solution to a long-standing mystery — the origins of a strange
phenomenon known as "Short-Duration Gamma Ray Bursts." Hundreds of brief,
mysterious flashes of high-energy radiation from deepest space, lasting less
than two seconds, have been measured and recorded over decades, but nobody knew
what they were.
The similarity between the Dec. 27 burst and these
short-duration bursts lies in the brief spike of hard gamma rays that arrives
first and carries almost all the energy. In the recent burst, for example, the
hard spike lasted only two-tenths of a second. This was followed by a "tail" of
X-rays that lasted over six minutes. As the tail faded, its brightness
oscillated on a 7.56 second cycle, the known rotation period of the
magnetar.
According to Duncan and Thompson's theory, the oscillating X-ray
tail that followed was due to a residue of electrons, positrons and gamma-rays
trapped in the magnetar's magnetic field. Such a hot "trapped fireball" shrinks
and evaporates over minutes, as electrons and positrons annihilate. The
measurements of Hurley's team corroborate this picture. The tail's brightness
appears to oscillate because the fireball is stuck to the surface of the
rotating star by the magnetic field, so it rotates with the star like a
lighthouse beacon.
Duncan and his team argue that the hard initial spike of
these giant flares is so bright that it can be detected from very far away,
meaning that some of the short flares we see are from other galaxies, though the
soft X-ray tails are too faint to be seen.
Duncan and his collaborators
predict that if a magnetar flares as brightly as the December 27 event within
100 million light-years of Earth, astronomers should be able to detect it. Texas
astronomers John Scalo and Sheila Kannappan helped Duncan estimate the rate at
which such distant flares might be seen. They estimated that of order 40% of the
short bursts previously observed could have been such magnetar bursts. There is
a good probability that the newly-launched Swift satellite will see a magnetar
burst once a month.
Launched in November 2004 and gathering data only since
January, Swift is designed to automatically turn its X-ray telescope toward a
burst in order to accurately pin down its position.
Duncan's team estimates
that Swift will spot an abundance of magnetars lurking in other galaxies. In
some cases, Swift's X-ray telescope may even catch the oscillating tail and
measure the rotation period of the faraway star.
"Swift will open up a new
field of astronomy: the study of extragalactic magnetars," Duncan
said.
Co-authors with Hurley, Boggs, Duncan and Thompson were D. M. Smith of
the UC Santa Cruz physics department, RHESSI and Wind principal investigator and
Space Sciences Laboratory Director Robert Lin, and teams of U.S., Swiss,
Russian, and German scientists.
— END —
Notes to editors: Robert Duncan and Kevin Hurley will be at NASA Headquarters
in Washington, D.C., on Friday, Feb. 18, to attend a NASA Science Update about
the Dec. 27 giant flare and observations by the recently launched Swift
satellite. Duncan's cell phone number is (512) 587-0043. Hurley's cell phone
number is (510) 366-4463.
Duncan normally can be reached at (512) 471-7426 or
at duncan@astro.as.utexas.edu. Hurley can be reached at his office, (510)
643-9173, or via e-mail at khurley@ssl.berkeley.edu. Steven Boggs is at
(510) 643-4129 or boggs@ssl.berkeley.edu.
Robert Sanders, science press
officer for UC Berkeley, can be reached at (510) 643-6998 or
rsanders@berkeley.edu.
http://www.12thharmonic.com/astroturf/index.php
Huge 'star-quake' rocks Milky Way
It turns out that
the 26th and 27th of December were not only turbulent for our planet, but
turbulent for our galaxy too. The explosion took place in the constellation of
Sagittarius. I'm very grateful to fixed star expert Diana K Rosenberg for
calculating the position and time of the explosion, which in astrological
tropical zodiac terms occurred at 01CAP28; LAT 3N 25 53; DECL 19S20; RA 18 06
18. It occurred Dec 27, 2004, at 21:30:26 UT.
BBC - Astronomers say they have been stunned by the amount of energy released
in a star explosion on the far side of our galaxy, 50,000 light-years
away
The flash of radiation on 27 December was so powerful that it bounced
off the Moon and lit up the Earth's atmosphere.
The blast occurred on the
surface of an exotic kind of star - a super-magnetic neutron star called SGR
1806-20.
If the explosion had been within just 10 light-years, Earth could
have suffered a mass extinction, it is said.
"We figure that it's probably
the biggest explosion observed by humans within our galaxy since Johannes Kepler
saw his supernova in 1604," Dr Rob Fender, of Southampton University, UK, told
the BBC News website.
One calculation has the giant flare on SGR 1806-20
unleashing about 10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts.
"This is a
once-in-a-lifetime event. We have observed an object only 20km across, on the
other side of our galaxy, releasing more energy in a 10th of a second than the
Sun emits in 100,000 years," said Dr Fender.
VLA Probes Secrets of Mysterious Magnetar
A giant flash of energy from a supermagnetic neutron star thousands of
light-years from Earth may shed a whole new light on scientists' understanding
of such mysterious "magnetars" and of gamma-ray bursts. In the nearly two months
since the blast, the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA)
telescope has produced a wealth of surprising information about the event, and
"the show goes on," with continuing observations.
The blast from an object
named SGR 1806-20 came on Dec. 27, 2004, and was first detected by orbiting
gamma-ray and X-ray telescopes. It was the brightest outburst ever seen coming
from an object beyond our own solar system, and its energy overpowered most
orbiting telescopes. The burst of gamma rays and X-rays even disturbed the
Earth's ionosphere, causing a sudden disruption in some radio
communications.
While the intensely bright gamma ray burst faded in a matter
of minutes, the VLA and other radio telescopes have been tracking the
explosion's "afterglow" for weeks, providing most of the data astronomers need
to figure out the physics of the blast.
A magnetar is a superdense neutron
star with a magnetic field thousands of trillions of times more intense than
that of the Earth. Scientists believe that SGR 1806-20's giant burst of energy
was somehow triggered by a "starquake" in the neutron star's crust that caused a
catastrophic disruption in the magnetar's magnetic field. The magnetic
disruption generated the huge burst of gamma rays and "boiled off" particles
from the star's surface into a rapidly expanding fireball that continues to emit
radio waves for weeks or months.
The VLA first observed SGR 1806-20 on Jan.
3, and has been joined by other radio telescopes in Australia, the Netherlands,
and India. Scientific papers prepared for publication based on the first month's
radio observations report a number of key discoveries about the object.
Scientists using the VLA have found:
• The fireball of radio-emitting
material is expanding at roughly one-third the speed of light.
• The
expanding fireball is elongated, and may change its shape quickly.
•
Alignment of the radio waves (polarization) confirms that the fireball is not
spherical.
• The flare emitted an amount of energy that represents a
significant fraction of the total energy stored in the magnetar's magnetic
field.
Of the dozen or so magnetars known to astronomers, only one other has
been seen to experience a giant outburst. In 1998, SGR 1900+14 put out a blast
similar in many respects to SGR 1806-20's, but much weaker.
National Radio
Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) astronomer Dale Frail observed the 1998 outburst
and has been watching SGR 1806-20 for a decade. Both magnetars are part of the
small group of objects called soft gamma-ray repeaters, because they repeatedly
experience much weaker outbursts of gamma rays. In early January, he was hosting
a visiting college student while processing the first VLA data from SGR
1806-20's giant outburst.
"I literally could not believe what I was looking
at," Frail said. "Immediately I could see that this flare was 100 times stronger
than the 1998 flare, and 10,000 times brighter than anything this object had
done before."
"I couldn't stay in my chair, and this student got to see a
real, live astronomer acting like an excited little kid," Frail said.
The
excitement isn't over, either. "The show goes on and we continue to observe this
thing and continue to get surprises," said Greg Taylor, an astronomer for NRAO
and the Kavli Institute of Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology in Stanford,
Calif..
One VLA measurement may cause difficulties for scientists trying to
fit SGR 1806-20 into a larger picture of gamma ray bursts (GRBs). GRBs, seen
regularly from throughout the universe, come in two main types--very short
bursts and longer ones. The longer ones are generally believed to result when a
massive star collapses into a black hole, rather than into a neutron star as in
a supernova explosion. The strength and short duration of SGR 1806-20's December
outburst has led some astronomers to speculate that a similar event could be
seen out to a considerable distance from Earth. That means, they say, that
magnetars may be the source of the short-period GRBs.
That interpretation is
based to some extent on a previous measurement that indicates SGR 1806-20 is
nearly 50,000 light-years from Earth. One team of observers, however, analyzed
the radio emission from SGR 1806-20 and found evidence that the magnetar is only
about 30,000 light-years distant. The difference, they say, reduces the
likelihood that SGR 1806-20 could be a parallel for short-period GRBs.
In any case, the wealth of information astronomers have gathered about the
tremendous December blast makes it an extremely important event for
understanding magnetars and GRBs.
Source: The National Science Foundation
http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index658.htm
January 10, 2005
Continuing Earth Changes Cripple American
Submarine and Pose New Dangers for the American Continents
By:
Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Russian Subscribers
Continued energy
surges, and as yet still unexplained by Western scientists, continue to bombard
the earth’s Southern Hemispheric Regions this morning causing many widespread
and anomalous events throughout the world and affecting all of its
peoples.
Western media sources are presently reporting the dire
circumstances surrounding the United States Los Angeles Class Nuclear Submarine
San Francisco and the latest reports are saying that one crewman has died
and ‘23 other crew members are being treated aboard for injuries including
broken bones, bruises and lacerations’.
The BBC also reports in this
article that, “The US Navy said it did not know what the vessel had struck and
was investigating severe damage to the outside of the submarine.”
Not
being reported by the Western media though is that the USS San Francisco (SSN
711) is part of the United States Navy’s Pacific Fleet, and a part of what is
known as Submarine Squadron Fifteen based out of the US Territory of Guam,
located in the Mariana Islands Region of the Pacific Ocean.
The
significance of this lies in the eruption on Anatahan Island, a part of the
Mariana Islands and in the ‘patrol zone’ of the USS San Francisco.
As
related to us by one Russian Naval Official, “Imagine you walking around your
house at night with the lights off and someone had re-arranged the furniture,
make no mistake about it, the American submariners ‘know’ their courses too well
and are too highly trained for this to happen suddenly. Some extreme
geologic ‘change’ had to have happened for this accident to occur.”
Could
this ‘extreme geologic change’ have been this eruption?
As reported in
the Western media regarding this event we hear, “The volcano's activity
intensified beginning Tuesday and Wednesday last week after months of extremely
low seismic activities, which followed the second batch of eruptions from April
to June last year. The volcano on Anatahan first erupted after centuries of
dormancy on May 10, 2003, with ash plume rising to more than 30,000
feet.”
We are also continuing to receive reports of meteor fireballs
entering the earth’s atmosphere. Yesterday another such sighting was
reported as occurring in the United States region of Alaska, and where it is
said, “It streaked quickly from the west to the east in a steep downward arc,
and soon wasn't visible behind the mountains.”
More information also
continues to be received by us also relating to my December 28, 2004 report,
Evidence for Sumatra 9.0 Quake Leans towards Meteorite Strike.
In one
research report by the United States National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) it
clearly states, and in apparent contradiction to the known facts about The Great
Tsunami of 2004, that, “In the Indian Ocean, however, the Indo-Australian plate
is being subducted beneath the Eurasian plate at its east margin. Therefore,
most tsunamis generated in this area are propagated toward the southwest shores
of Java and Sumatra, rather than into the Indian Ocean.”
As recent events
have occurred however we know this not to be the case due to the fact that the
waves propagated out from a ‘center’ to all areas of the Indian Ocean, to even
the African Coast and beyond.
Numerous, yet conflicting, Western media
reports also continue to be generated about this cataclysmic event with no
regard to science fact but rather relying on speculation alone.
Reports
are varying to many extremes of sea floor horizontal and/or vertical movement,
such as one report that states, “slippage occurred along about 1,200 km of the
interface between the tectonic plates”, and another that states that it was, “…a
600-mile-long (965km) rupture that generated a 35ft vertical displacement in the
sea floor.”
But the differences in how many kilometers of vertical
displacement did or did not occur, or how high or low various parts of the sea
floor rose or fell are not as important as to how fast these assertions of fact
were being spread by the Western media sources.
They in fact began
within hours of the cataclysm occurring, with no scientific research being
conducted and in contradiction to what the United States National Geophysical
Data Center had reported and Prof Ravinder Kumar of the Centre of Advance
Studies in Geology, Punjab University who has said, “There is no historic record
of a tsunami in the Indian Ocean.”
This information alone does not
constitute proof of a meteorite strike being the cause of this cataclysmic, but
neither do the pronouncements by the Western media stating the cause as being an
earthquake event. The behavior of the waves in the Indian Ocean though do
suggest a meteorite due to their concentric nature of flowing throughout the
oceans basin, where if these were caused by an earthquake would have been omni
or bi directed only as scientists have previously predicted, and particularly in
a region where no historical reports of a tsunami had ever been
recorded.
Not being connected in the Western Media about this event
either was its precursor which occurred in the Macquarie Island region of
Antarctica and was measured as an 8.2 event on the Richter scale. (An 8.2
Richter event is equal to 3 billion tons of TNT and the 9.0 event in the Indian
Ocean was equal to 32 billion tons.) But released almost simultaneously
with the Antarctica 8.2 event was a report from the United States space
organization NASA's Near Earth Object Program in an ‘Asteroid Alert’ which in
part said, “For comparison, the Barringer Meteor Crater in northern Arizona is
thought to have been created by an iron meteorite between 30 and 100 meters in
diameter. Its impact would have released energy equivalent to about 3.5 million
tons of TNT.”
More interesting in the light of these recent events are
that these two events have more in common than their historically rare power in
that both the Antarctica event and the Indian Ocean event are connected by their
sameness in both geological and magnetic anomalous features, and as previously
mapped by scientists.
One such other area on the earth is known as the
Cayman Trough and is located in the Northwest Caribbean Sea.
A number of
the world’s top scientists in their fields have reported on this region in a
report that in part says, “We review the plate tectonic evolution of the
Caribbean area based on a revised model for the opening of the central North
Atlantic and the South Atlantic, as well based on an updated model of the motion
of the Americas relative to the Atlantic-Indian hotspot reference frame.
We focus on post-83 Ma reconstructions, for which we have combined a set of new
magnetic anomaly data in the central North Atlantic between the Kane and
Atlantis fracture zones with existing magnetic anomaly data in the central North
and South Atlantic oceans and fracture zone identifications from a dense gravity
grid from satellite altimetry to compute North America-South America plate
motions and their uncertainties.”
As we are all aware, the largest
magnetic anomalous area in the world is located in Russia and is named the Kursk
Satellite Magnetic Anomaly (KMA), and in the memory of our fallen heroes from
the great Russian Submarine Kursk of the same naming.
© January
10, 2005, EU and US all rights reserved.
(Note: There is no easy way to
describe to foreign speaking peoples the style of writing one encounters when
reading Russian writers like Sorcha Faal, who are steeped in Russian shamanistic
thought and in the lives they live. A report like this particular one can
best be analogized as ‘circle of thought’ writing in that the beginning should
equal the end. In this report for example it begins with an American Submarine
disaster and ends with a Russian one. The meanings that can be derived are
for individual thought and are not meant to be ‘scientific’, as it is defined in
Western nations. Russian shamanistic thinking encompasses the ‘whole’ of
all things and can be likened to seeing and attempting to understand the
‘connections’ between all things. The same ‘known’ facts of information
are used like Westerners do, but then are ‘added’ with the ‘unknown’ so that in
knowing the greater ‘whole’ of ‘thing’ warnings can be given to help prepare the
entire tribe.)
Original
Article
EXOPOLITICS:
POLITICS, GOVERNMENT AND LAW IN THE UNIVERSE (Filament Books)
by Alfred
Lambremont Webre, JD, MEd
http://www.filamentbooks.com/
