the-star-stuff:

December 27, 2004: The Day Earth Survived Its Greatest Space-Ray Attack —Ever

It came suddenly from the distant reaches of the Constellation Sagittarius, some 50,000 light years away. For a brief instant, a couple of tenths of a second, on December 27, 2004 an invisible burst of energy the equivalent of half a million years of sunlight shone on Earth. Many orbiting satellites electronics were zapped and the Earth’s upper atmosphere was amazingly ionized from a massive hit of gamma ray energy.

The source of the invisible attack was a rare magnetar SGR 1806-20 on the other side of the Milky Way. These soft gamma ray repeaters, SGRs, occur when twisted magnetic fields attempt to re-align themselves and crack the magetar’s crust releasing the awesome burst or pulse of energy with a death-zone of a few light years. Magnetars have magnetic fields 1000 times those of ordinary pulsars -so powerful as to be lethal at a distance of 1000 kilometers.

Image at the top of the page is an rtist’s conception of a gamma-ray burst. The GRB is visible from Earth if the jets (yellow) are oriented so that one points toward us. (Image courtesy of NASA.)

via NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

scinerds:

Is the Higgs boson real?

Imaged Above: A collision event recorded by Atlas at the LHC. Bloggers report rumours that evidence of the Higgs boson will be announced next Tuesday. Photograph: Cern/PA

A couple of blogs, including viXra and Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong, have now posted rumours that the Atlas and CMS teams see Higgs-like signals around 125GeV, though they say the evidence is not robust enough to claim an official discovery.

the-star-stuff:

Some Alien Planets Could Be Made of Diamonds, Study Finds

Some alien planets could be packing some major bling, according to a new study that predicts planets around other stars could be made largely of diamond.

But while such a place might sound beautiful, you wouldn’t want to visit, scientists say. A diamond planetwould very likely be devoid of life and incapable of supporting living beings like us.

“We think a diamond planet must be a very cold, dark place,” Ohio State University Earth scientist Wendy Panero, leader of the study, said in a statement.

These potential giant terrestrial planets, whose insides could be up to 50-percent diamond, are dubbed “carbon super-Earths” by scientists. [Gallery: The Strangest Alien Planets]

read the full article here

Black Dwarfs will also be, technically, diamonds in the sky.

jtotheizzoe:

Quantum theorem weirdness gets weirder: Apparently the wavefunction is a real physical object after all

Check the link for the full explanation of what’s going on here (my biologist’s brain starts melting a little when it comes to wavefunctions). But here’s a quote:

“I don’t like to sound hyperbolic, but I think the word ‘seismic’ is likely to apply to this paper,” says Antony Valentini, a theoretical physicist specializing in quantum foundations at Clemson University in South Carolina.

I don’t wanna sound obvious, but that’s pretty hyperbolic.

(via Nature News, GIF-y goodness via Wikimedia)