Tag: explosion:
Astronomers Report Brightest-Ever, Three-Year Cosmic Explosion
The brightness of the explosion, called AT2021lwx, has lasted for three years, while most supernovas are only bright for a few months. The event, still being detected by telescopes, occurred nearly 8 billion light-years away from Earth when the universe was about 6 billion years old. The luminosity of the explosion is also three times brighter than tidal disruption events, when stars fall into supermassive black holes.
But what triggered such a long-lived, massive cosmic explosion? Astronomers said they think a supermassive black hole disrupted a vast gas or dust cloud, potentially thousands of times larger than our sun. It’s possible that the cloud was drawn off the course of its orbit and went flying into the black hole, the researchers said. As the black hole swallowed pieces of the hydrogen cloud, shock waves likely reverberated through the cloud’s remnants and into the swirling mass of material that orbits around the black hole…
The research team determined that the incredibly luminous event was nearly 100 times brighter than all the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy combined.
The New York Times calls its “one of the most violent and energetic acts of cosmic cannibalism ever witnessed, perhaps the biggest explosion seen yet in the history of the universe… [A] black hole perhaps a billion times as massive as the sun seems to be gorging on a humongous cloud of gas.”
“Most supernovae and tidal disruption events only last for a couple of months before fading away,” said Philip Wiseman, an astrophysicist at the University of Southampton and the lead author of the new paper [published Thursday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society]. “For something to be bright for two-plus years was immediately very unusual….”
He added that, with a total radiated energy equal to 100 supernovas, “it is one of the most luminous transients ever discovered.” Jolt for jolt, that would put it in the company of colliding black holes. “Black holes colliding release energy in gravitational waves at an extreme luminosity — 10 billion times more ‘powerful’ than this explosion,” Dr. Wiseman wrote. “But that power only lasts for 20 milliseconds,” adding that this explosion has lasted years.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ukrainian city of Khmelnytskyi rocked by huge explosion causing fireball which ‘injured 30 people’
Astronomers See Largest Explosion in Space Yet
Astronomers have seen the most energetic cosmic explosion yet, which they believe resulted from a gas cloud being disrupted by a supermassive black hole.
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The SpaceX Starship explosion was deliberate
About four minutes after SpaceX‘s gargantuan rocket lifted from its Texas launch pad, it burst into a fireball over the Gulf of Mexico, never reaching space.
Though SpaceX hasn’t shared many details yet about what happened during Starship’s maiden voyage, one fact is known: It was intentionally ordered to explode.
Rockets are destroyed in the air when people’s lives could be even remotely at risk of falling debris. In the days since the uncrewed test, no injuries or major property damage appear to have been reported.
When the rocket launched at 9:33 a.m. ET April 20, 2023, some of the rocket’s 33 booster engines had either burned out or failed to light from the start. As Starship ascended, cameras caught views of the flames underneath it, appearing to show some of the engines had cut out.
In a statement released after the incident, SpaceX said Starship climbed to about 26 miles over the ocean before beginning to lose altitude and tumble. Then, self-destruct commands were sent to the booster and ship, which hadn’t separated as planned, the company said.
What ultimately initiated that disintegration isn’t completely clear, Dan Dumbacher, executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, told Mashable.
“Now it’s a pure race as to whether the aerodynamic pressure breaks the vehicle up or the flight termination system does,” he said, “but it really doesn’t matter because the end result is the same.”
Credit: Screengrab from SpaceX broadcast
Starship is a super-heavy-lift rocket and spacecraft, built to carry immense cargo and astronauts into deep space. The 400-foot-tall stainless steel skyscraper has about twice as much thrust as NASA‘s mega moon rocket that flew into space for the first time five months ago and is fueled with 10 million pounds of liquid methane and oxygen.
SpaceX is used to blowups, and prior to the launch, billionaire founder Elon Musk was frank about the odds for the rocket to work on the first try.
“There’s a lot of risk associated with this first launch, so I would not say that it is likely to be successful,” he said during a video conference with a National Academies panel in 2021. “But I think we will make a lot of progress.”
Despite Starship never having reached space, industry experts largely regarded the launch as a partial success because the rocket managed to clear the launch tower and traveled higher than any Starship prototype had before.
Meanwhile, the general public seemed unsure of how to think of the whole thing: After all, usually, when something big and expensive goes boom, it’s considered bad. But SpaceX has always approached rocketry differently from NASA, working a little messier and faster to achieve its goals.
In terms of the explosive ending, Dumbacher said spaceport safety officers are required to terminate a flight if a rocket meanders into an area where the risk of debris hitting someone on the ground could exceed a probability of one in 30 million.
“People ought to be looking at this as good — the flight termination system, if it was needed, actually worked,” he said.
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Flight termination systems usually consist of a computer wired to explosives within a part of the rocket that allows for the vehicle to be quickly destroyed without causing a huge blast or igniting the remaining fuel. These mechanisms exist in every rocket licensed to launch.
Thursday’s orbital flight test was a crucial demonstration of hardware NASA is depending on to get humans back on the moon in the next few years. The space agency has a $4 billion contract with SpaceX to use Starships to land astronauts on the moon during Artemis III and IV, two upcoming missions that could come as early as 2025 and 2028, respectively. As part of the deal, the company will need to conduct a successful uncrewed test flight to the moon beforehand.
During the test flight, the colossal booster was supposed to separate from the rocket about three minutes after liftoff, then drop into the ocean. The ship would fly 150 miles into space above Earth, then splash down off the Hawaiian coast about 1.5 hours later.
NASA administrator Bill Nelson congratulated SpaceX on Thursday, framing the flight attempt as a bold step in the right direction.
Credit: SpaceX
SpaceX will be poring over its data from the brief flight to figure out what led to the problems with the engines and the booster not separating.
The Federal Aviation Administration will oversee an investigation into the mishap, a standard practice for such anomalies. Starship will be able to fly again after the agency determines “any system, process, or procedure related to the mishap does not affect public safety,” according to a statement released to Mashable.
“If anything, I would like people to view this as a learning experience for SpaceX, not as a failure,” Dumbacher said. “They’re going to eventually get the system working because of what they learn on these flight tests.”
Another Starship explosion would be bad news for nearby park managers
Tomorrow’s Starship orbital flight test may well go explosively wrong, and SpaceX’s less than stellar coordination with officials responsible for overseeing debris cleanup at nearby state parks could leave them with another “substantial burden,” emails between the organizations show. Starship’s upcoming test does not have a very high probability of success, according to SpaceX CEO […]
Another Starship explosion would be bad news for nearby park managers by Aria Alamalhodaei originally published on TechCrunch
Space Scientists Reveal Brightest Gamma Explosion Ever
RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes: A recent paper on ArXiv describes a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) whose light arrived late last year as one of the strongest ever observed. GRB 221009A was detected on October 9 last year (yes, that number is a date), so 5 and a bit months from event to papers published is remarkably quick, and I anticipate that there will be a lot more papers on it in the future. Stand-out points are :
– it lasted for more than ten hours after detection (a space x-ray telescope had time to orbit out of the Earth’s shadow and observe it)
– it could (briefly) be observed by amateur astronomers.
– it is also one of the closest gamma-ray bursts seen and is among the most energetic and luminous bursts.
It’s redshift is given as z= 0.151, which Wikipedia translates as occurring 1.9 billion years ago, at a distance of 2.4 billion light-years from Earth.
Observations have been made of the burst in radio telescopes (many sites, continuing), optical (1 site ; analysis of HST imaging is still in work), ultraviolet (1 space telescope), x-ray (2 space telescopes) and gamma ray (1 sapce telescope) — over a range of 1,000,000,000,000,000-fold (10^15) in wavelength. It’s brightness is such that radio observatories are expected to continue to detect it for “years to come”.
The model of the source is of several (3~10) Earth-masses of material ejected from (whatever, probably a compact body (neutron star or black dwarf) merger) and impacting the interstellar medium at relativistic speeds (Lorentz factor 9, velocity >99.2% of c). The absolute brightness of the burst is high (about 10^43 J) and it is made to seem brighter by being close, and also by the energy being emitted in a narrow jet (“beamed”), which we happen to be near the axis of.
General news sites are starting to notice the reports, including the hilarious acronym of “BOAT — Brightest Of All Time”. Obviously, with observations having only occurred for about 50 years. we’re likely to see something else as bright within the next 50 years.
The brightness of the x-rays from this GRB is such that the x-rays scattered from dust in our galaxy creates halos around the source — which are bright enough to see, and to tell us things about the dust in our galaxy (which is generally very hard to see). Those images are more photogenic than the normal imagery for GRBs — which is nothing — so you’ll see them a lot.
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