massive Gamma Ray Bubbles
I saw on NASA's website they discovered 2 in the Milky Way. What are they? Do they pose any type of threat? Could someone dummy this down for me please?
massive Gamma Ray Bubbles
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Just wondering.
Hi Laura I posted the link in the off topics………they think it might have been caused by a massive outburst from the black hole at the center of our galaxy………but to be honest they don't exatually know what they are……something exciting to keep and eye on though.
I am sure they pose not threat what so ever…..there is always new and exciting things getting found that we don't know for sure what they are or how they came about………thats what i love about reaseach and the cosmos :)
Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein
Depends how you want to define 'threat'. Gamma rays are a threat if you go out and stick your hand in the middle of them, for example - radiation sickness isn't exactly fun.
If we look (or rather instruments look) out over the entirety of space, we see Gamma rays all over the place, often concentrated in gamma ray bursts, where again, we'd rather not want to be found face first with an oncoming burst of them, so it's a good job we don't see any of them heading our way.
There is an image on the NASA article which shows the scale, helpfully pointing out that the Solar System is nowhere near these concentrations, and will never get anywhere near on our journey around the galaxy - we will always be around 25,000 light years away from the middle where these bubbles seem to originate.
I posted in another thread that Wikipedia says if a large one we aimed at us from the Milky Way it could cause a mass extinction. So, if they throw something at us, since they emit the gamma ray bursts, we're pretty much toast, aren't we?
Yes, like I say it's not something you want to stick around and experience, but no matter where we look, even with this recent finding, no deadly source of gamma rays are incoming.
I forget the odds that were given for the likelihood of a fatal gamma ray burst within our lifetimes, something like 1 in 15 million. You're far more likely to witness an asteroid hitting the Earth than a Gamma ray burst, and we're familiar with the long odds of those. Then again, you've got more chance of surviving an asteroid impact than a well aimed gamma ray burst too.
But to sum it all up, these recently discovered bubbles pose no threat to us.
it's 50,000 light years away :s
it's gonna take a least 50000 years to get anywhere near us…….like Elliot has said there is nothing to worry about and there is no threat.
Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein
it's gonna take a least 50000 years to get anywhere near us
I perhaps wouldn't even go that far if it's being funneled into the shapes we see today.
If it turns out to be millions of years old as suggested, then it's funneled that way into bubbles above and below the galactic plane and appears to have stayed there. It hasn't 'exploded' out from the middle, for example, where it would be more of a threat, it's just gone up and out.
Of course the point you make still stands even if it were to find its way out further and further or swamp the galaxy, humans themselves might not be around to see the day.
I tell you, it's almost as interesting trying to work out how something could wipe us out, than finding out how something won't. Maybe just me there…
Depends……..alot of people just get freaked out by things these days, maybe it's because of our lack of understanding things. however there has been no talk what so ever that this find is any risk to mankind at all.
Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein
So for each lightyear it is away, its actually 1,000 earth years?
1 earth year=1,000 lightyears
yes :)
Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein
No, a light year is a measurement of distance, it's how far light travels through a vacuum in 1 Julian year (which you might as well call an Earth year, there's only 10 minutes or so difference).
So one light year works out to 9,461,000,000,000 kilometers (9 and a half trillion kilometers), and these structures are 50,000 times that number from the tip of one to the tip of the other (something like 474 quadrillion kilometers, about half of that on each side of the galaxy).
The all important number if you're concerned about how close they are to Earth is, if we take these bubbles origins to be the center of the galaxy, we're about the same distance away from the center as the top of one of the bubbles are from the center, about 236 quadrillion kilometers.
Now the bubbles widen out from the center of the galaxy, so they'll be closer to us than that for sure, lets say a nice round number of 200 quadrillion kilometers away - that's the same distance as traveling to the Moon and back over 600 billion times. No, half that, if "there and back" equals one time, then it's 300 billion times. But you get the idea.
It is safe to say they are, and will forever be, an incredibly long way away from us on your teeny tiny human scale.
Hopefully, I've remembered not to miss off a 0 somewhere along the line. But the point is, very very very very very very very far away, and it would take a very very very very very very very long time for us to go and visit, or for them to come here, even if we were traveling at the fastest speed possible through the Universe.
Yeah so for a light year is one whole year on earth………….I know this :s I know it's measured in distance but the fact is it's still a year for ever light year :s
Fact remaining it ain't gonna kill us anytime soon if in fact ever.
Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein
Yeah so for a light year is one whole year on earth………….I know this :s I know it's measured in distance but the fact is it's still a year for ever light year :s
Fact remaining it ain't gonna kill us anytime soon if in fact ever.
Actually no, a lightyear does not equal to a year unless the object of your interrest moves towards you at the speed of light. As Elliot said, LY is a meassurment of distance, not of time. So if you put it crude, you can say that a LY=the time it takes for light to travel a year, but since not many objects move that fast the comparison with a earth year is in most cases wrong.
Facts are stubborn things.
- Ronald Reagan
Fact still remains this thing is not going to kill us or harm us in anyway……..so dunno why people are making a big deal out of it :/
Just because you hear he word gamma rays don't mean instantally that it's gonna wipe out the intire world. they dunno even know for sure what it is or how it was created. I know one thing is for sure nowhere in the near future are we gonna be harmed from this.
As for light years thank you for correcting me. shows you how much i know :)
Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein
So, how long would it take a gamma ray brust from one of thw bubbles to reach earth and cause a mass extinction if it was to throw one??
what makes you think this would happen in the first please? have they actually said this will happen anytime in the furture? because i can't see anything about it :/
Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein
I was just curious. I worry a lot. Just wanted the opinions of the people here about if it could harm us and how long it would take the ray to actually reach us. I haven't seen where they've said it does or does not pose a threat.
If anything did happen it wouldn't reach us in our life time………so don't worry to much about it please :)
Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein
^ Yes, that
These things won't throw any bursts out, they're just a gathering of gamma rays if you like.
But suppose they were to burst out of their bubbly shape and travel through space as fast as they can possibly go, you'd be looking at a time of at least 20,000 years.
Technically, it is already here and has been for many thousands of year since we can detect it and and measure it.
Will we die from it? NO! Because it is so low in radiation that we barely able to detect is.
We get bombarded by cosmic for billions of years and life is still here.
It's crazy to think it could explode or shoot something off and it would take 20,000 earth years to reach us….i was thinking it would be an overnight thing….or a month thing…..This stuff really confuses me. Sorry.
Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.
So something at 26.000 light years away will take minimal 26.000 years at the speed of light to get here.
Now if an object of gas is travelling in the direction of Earth then we can measure the speed in what they call a red-shift.
It would be called a blue shift since it is travelling towards us, red-shift if it travels away from us. Every chemical has a certain lines in the colour rainbow at specified frequencies. When the lines are a bit more to the red then it is speeding away, if it is more blue then it is coming at us. The more red or blue shifted it is, the higher the speed.
Two more clues that it is coming our direction is when we measure the gamma rays and notice it increases over a short time.
This increase is not measured.
But if the gamma rays were indeed deadly, then trust me any hand held gamma ray detector everywhere in the world would go off right now. And many people have such a hand held gamma ray detector even hobbyist. But the rays coming from this structure is barely measurable with the most sensitive instruments pointed directly towards it.
To make things even more confusing then, in some ways it is an overnight thing, insofar as we wouldn't know it had started it's journey until it had arrived.
You might have heard that light from the Sun takes just over 8 minutes to reach Earth. The speed of light is the fastest speed in the Universe, nothing can go faster and yet it still takes 8 minutes for light to travel the 150 million km from the Sun to your eyes. Scale that aaaaaalllll the way up to crossing a quarter of the galaxy and you've got a 25,000 year wait for something to happen.
It is a bit like sound.
Assume you are a bat and can only hear sound.
A lightning strike would occur and 3 seconds later you would hear the thunder because that is the time it takes for sound to reach you as a bat. But since you are a bat you never saw the lightning strike.
Light is a bit like sound, it has a certain speed to cover a certain distance and this structure is 26.000 light-years away. Don't confuse the word "year" in light year since it actually represents a distance, not a time.
One light-year is 9,460,730,000,000 km far.
26,000 light years would be 26,000 * 9,460,730,000,000 km = 24,597,900,000,000,000,000 km far.
Light would need 26,000 year to travel this 24,597,900,000,000,000,000 km.
Ok so i go it wrong…….you all know wha i was getting at :)
Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein
So, it literally, it will take 26,000 earth(calendar) years to get here? It could not be here to pose a threat in my life or my kids life, even if it brust tomorrow?
NO!!!!
Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein
And it's not even en route to meet us anyway, it's pointing in another direction entirely. It can travel as fast as it likes, it's going to wrong way if it wants to arrive at Earth.
Remember, we're only talking about the 'what if's', namely 'what if it were pointing towards us'. Because it's not, we've nothing to fear.
Some of the best examples to show it are Supernova, where we see explosions and we can see them change year by year, but they actually went 'bang' thousands and thousands of years earlier, it's just the image of the explosions, the light itself took thousands and thousands of years to arrive at Earth - it's still an explosion, it's still acting like a quick flash of light, expansion of dust and leftovers, it's just we're seeing it long after it happened, literally looking back in time.
It's always good to find an analogy:
Someone manages to have a video camera out just when someone falls over. It's naturally hilarious, so we run down the street to show that video to our friends. By the time we get there, the person who fell over has got up, brushed themselves off and got back to whatever they were doing, but we can show our friends what happened as if they were there - the video of the fall takes the same amount of time as the actual fall, we're just seeing it at a later time.
The person falling over is a supernova explosion or a gamma ray burst, the video and whoever is running back to show it off are the light or gamma rays traveling through space/down the street, so that they can get to Earth/our friends.
To add to this low energy levels.
This concentrated gamma rays energy levels might be big, but it is so diluted in such a huge 2 halve spheres that the rays themselves are barely detectable. It can never reach any dangerous levels.
Think of it like putting a drop of poison in the Atlantic ocean. It gets so diluted that it is just completely harmless.
It's too bad that the 2012 hucksters have caused some people to view a story which should fill the reader with wonder and curiosity to be filled with fear instead. Jessica, I'm sorry that this has happened to you, but as Emmylou and Mr. Elliott have assured us, we'll be just fine.
Heed the words of Dr. Phil Plait, who says that Space is wondrous enough without having to make up stuff about it.
"The Universe is cool enough without making up crap about it". —Dr. Phil Plait
"If psychics are capable of seeing into the future—why the f**k can't they give us the score to next year's Super Bowl" —Denis Leary
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