LAST LIGHT

Will it ruin the neighborhood or save a lot of carbon permits?

Pictures are coming online of the brightest stellar explosion ever recorded. Supernova SN 2006gy used to be  a star some 150 times the mass of our Sun, in a galaxy a quarter billion light-years away.

Its explosion was "so powerful that it may require a new type of mechanism that's been predicted theoretically but never seen before ," says Nathan Smith of UCal Berkeley of images  obtained late last year — by optical telescopes and NASA's orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory of a superova 100 times brighter than any seen before . The initial explanation was that it was an exploding white dwarf. But for a white dwarf to shine so  would require a surrounding cloud of hydrogen generating x-rays about 1,000 times brighter than those the Chandra telescope detected. Smith's UCal colleague  David Pooley says :
....Is   ETA CARINAE    Too Close For  Comfort ?

"We didn't think we'd see anything like this in the local Universe," Instead of  collapse into a black hole, the intensity of the light emitted suggests an explosion  hot enough for gamma ray protons to turn into electron-positron pairs, that annihilating each other blew the entire star away into space- no black hole or spinning neutron remnant remains. The abrupt pulse of radiation energy overwhelmed the doomed star's gravity and blew upwards of 20 solar masses away and  left behind a cloud spidery as the afterimage of a star shell  detonated on the Fourth of July.

That means that SN 2006gy may provide a unique insight into how the Universe's first generation of stars met their end, says Mario Livio of NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute. Even before SN 2006 gy exploded, the star expelled a lot of mass - several Suns' worth, in an eruption like that now seen spewing from Eta Carinae, a massive star that is all too close to us , at  7,500 light years away in our own galaxy.

SN 2006gy  raises fears that Eta Carinae could detonate in a similar way at any time — tomorrow or a millennium from now. If it does, you can expect to read the newspapers announcing Supernova Two Thousand Whatever by its own light in the middle of the night. Never mind the cosmic ray storm and fried satellites to follow-  Jim Hansen's NASA Goddard  cohorts should rejoice. That much starlight means we  can turn off the streetlights for a month , and spare Gaia tons and  tons of CO2 emission. It will also get rid of that pesky ozone hole- by temporarily destroying the O3 layer entirely. However , one weather proverb may survive in modified form: "Red Sky At Morning : Nitric Acid Rain Warning."

Comments

[Chauncey]

Love your cute way of suggesting that we might see a little oxidized N2. If so, I don't think many will be reading by the midnight beams from Eta Carinae.

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Carbon dioxide was one of the first gases to be described as a substance distinct from air. In the seventeenth century, the Flemish chemist Jan Baptist van Helmont observed that when he burned charcoal in a closed vessel, the mass of the resulting ash was much less than that of the original charcoal. His interpretation was that the rest of the charcoal had been transmuted into an invisible substance he termed a "gas" or "wild spirit" (spiritus sylvestre).

The properties of carbon dioxide were studied more thoroughly in the 1750s by the Scottish physician Joseph Black. He found that limestone (calcium carbonate) could be heated or treated with acids to yield a gas he called "fixed air." He observed that the fixed air was denser than air and did not support either flame or animal life. Black also found that when bubbled through an aqueous solution of lime (calcium hydroxide), it would precipitate calcium carbonate. He used this phenomenon to illustrate that carbon dioxide is produced by animal respiration and microbial fermentation. In 1772, English chemist Joseph Priestley published a paper entitled Impregnating Water with Fixed Air in which he described a process of dripping sulfuric acid (or oil of vitriol as Priestley knew it) on chalk in order to produce carbon dioxide, and forcing the gas to dissolve by agitating a bowl of water in contact with the gas.

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If it does, you can expect to read the newspapers announcing Supernova Two Thousand Whatever by its own light in the middle of the night.