Did NASA probe detect a KILLER GAMMA-RAY burst in Andromeda?

Sky watchers are rapidly turning their instruments in the direction of Andromeda, after NASA's Swift spacecraft spotted what looks like a deadly gamma-ray burst spotted at 9:21 PM UMT, May 27. That's got astrophysicists excited, because Andromeda is our nearest galactic neighbour, which means the data collection from the event …

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

That could mean a VERY bright supernova in visible light

Naked eye most likely. I'll be getting out the bins the moment the clouds clear (not likely at the moment), but supernovae last quite a while, so we should get to see it.

[DropBear]

Re: That could mean a VERY bright supernova in visible light

The real question is will this year's obligatory "Mars as large as the Moon!!!" spam flood read "Supernova as bright as the Sun!!!" instead then...?

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

Re: That could mean a VERY bright supernova in visible light

I do not doubt that (in the words of sir Patrick Moore) this will have "all the crackpots crawling out of the woodwork". A type 1a in M31 would be about magnitude 5, but that would not cause a GRB-like event. I would expect this to be brighter (although much depends on extinction by dust)

[Chemist]

Re: Retrocausality

"As it happens, GWs travelling faster than C is possible and they *might* affect certain unstable isotopes enough to detect, so anyone who has a radioactive decay setup should be back checking their data."

Suggest you post a (quality) ref. to this scientific 'breakthrough'

[Anonymous Coward]

RE. Re: Retrocausality

Gravitational waves have been theorized to travel at trans-luminal (ie FTL) velocities, but as they do not contain information other than "event happened" causality is preserved.

Neutrinos OTOH, have to travel at C due to their non interaction with the surrounding interstellar medium and the star itself, and this was indeed seen from SN1987A.

As GWs have not yet been observed experimentally from any source it would be possible for them to travel faster than C but not be observed except by very sensitive equipment.

My earlier comment re. radioisotopes could yet be correct as solar neutrinos affecting radioactive decay is an ongoing research topic with the time delay as yet unexplained.

A resonance between GWs and neutrinos could well provide the missing piece to the puzzle, yielding the observed peak/trough or trough/peak depending on internal nuclear structure.

ie the overall half life is unaffected.

[Chemist]

Re: RE. Retrocausality

So no real ref. then - bullshit !

[Chemist]

Re: RE. Retrocausality

I see, BTW, that you chose to delete your earlier post rather than get more downvotes. As for your 2nd post I understand all the words but amanfrommars makes much more sense !

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: RE. Retrocausality

V1.0 :-) also upon re-reading it i realised a more detailed explanation was needed.

The folks on hackaday seem to think my ideas make sense, then again this is slightly different to publishing a paper in arxiv.

Peer review by people on a forum may be useful for an engineering application but not for physics it seems.

Also, a lot of people have seen the infamous radioactive decay anomaly and it remains unexplained to this day, observations date back to the 1950's.

[Chemist]

Re: RE. Retrocausality

"i realised a more detailed explanation was needed."

"Gravitational waves have been theorized to travel at trans-luminal (ie FTL) velocities,"

"Neutrinos OTOH, have to travel at C due to their non interaction with the surrounding interstellar medium and the star itself,"

"it would be possible for them to travel faster than C "

That was not an explanation, merely a steaming pile !

[Shrimpling]

NASA have changed their mind

http://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/gcn3/16336.gcn3

Apparently it wasn't a GRB

[phuzz]

Re: NASA have changed their mind

How disappointing :(

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

Re: NASA have changed their mind

Pity

[Vladimir Plouzhnikov]

Re: NASA have changed their mind

"Instead, it was a serendipitous constant source in the field of view of a BAT subthreshold trigger."

[Peter Mount]

Re: NASA have changed their mind

A more detailed description of what happened:

http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~pae9/twitter/GRBM31.html

[ian 22]

Re: NASA have changed their mind

So no chance we'll be crisps tomorrow? So disappointing....

[Extra spicey vindaloo]

So it wasn't interesting, but can anyone explain what "Off-Axis" means in this context?

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

Off-axis in this context means outside the centre of the field of view of the instrument. Raw brightness data from many instruments need correction for contamination from nearby bright sources.

[DJO]

explain what "Off-Axis" means in this context

Ejections from rotating bodies tend to occur from the poles like a pair of searchlight beams, on-axis means being in line with one of the poles and getting washed with whatever is sprayed out.

[Uffish]

Interesting

Well it got my day off to a good start anyway.

[ian 22]

Off-axis means....

We'll not be pomme frits.

Mine's the one with the Nomex lining.

[Scroticus Canis]

"Preliminary estimates of put the source of the event at about 500 solar masses" - Really?

Who takes a Sci-Fi author's tweets as an estimate? Only black holes get to that sort of mass and they don't go supernova, even pair instability type.

Neutron stars have an upper limit of ±3 solar masses (M☉) before collapse to black hole, so a close orbit pair would be 6 M☉ max. Largest known star is ±265 M☉ and that could only be achieved by to hyper-giants merging.

Anyway, the event turned out to be a non-event.

(Sherlock because what's being smoked must be good)

[Bunbury]

Antimatter would surely go MOOB

Not entirely sure how said twitter chappie worked out that colliding neutron stars would contain 30 solar masses of antimatter. Ah, the joys of GroupThink.

[Silverburn]

The Culture...

...just kicked someone's ass.

[The last doughnut]

Re: The Culture...

They would never be so indiscreet

[ItsNotMe]

Fixed it for you.

"Did NASA probe detect a KILLER GAMMA-RAY burst in Andromeda?...OK...not really."

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt we would be puking our guts out from radiation sickness anyway.

2.5 million light years is a HELL of a long way away to sustain a focused gamma ray beam, even if we were on-axis.

[Robert Helpmann??]

IT Connection?

Actually, there is one:

In this particular case, we had to wait quite a while for that full dataset, probably (to be confirmed) related to a power outage at the Swift Data Center in the US, which struck with horrible timing.

Is there ever a good time for your data center to suffer an outage?

[Bunbury]

Re: IT Connection?

Cue the tinfoiler who suggests the outage was due to the GRB

[Anonymous Coward]

RE. Re. IT connection

Someone did suggest at work that thunderstorms and extragalactic cosmic rays might be connected causally.

So a big thunderstorm *might* be induced by a big enough GRB, leading to a "perfect storm" scenario.

Although unless small GRB was followed by a large radiation-puking-inducing GRB I think everyone would notice PDQ due to frequent Windows BSODs and Geiger counters going off the scale.

This is new science, it seems that the link between EGCRs and storms has only recently been uncovered.

So black holes really do affect life on Earth :-)

See http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-do-cosmic-rays-cause-lightning/

Also http://phys.org/news/2013-05-russian-evidence-notion-lightning-cosmic.html

[Steven Roper]

I'm not an astrophysicist, so there's probably something I'm missing, but... Wouldn't the Earth's magnetic field and Van Allen belts shield us from these things? You know, the way they shield us from that bloody great thermonuclear bomb that's blazing its guts out 150 million kilometres away?

[Destroy All Monsters]

Well, in this case you just get pure light (gamma radiation), so there won't be shielding by magnetic fields (which trap electrically charged particles, forming the Van Allen Galactic Fried Grilling Zone)

On the other hand, the atmosphere is pretty good absorber of this kind of energy. You will get ionization in the upper layers and the accompanying chemical reactions (NOx formation and whatnot, possible elimination of the ozone layer) and electromagnetic phenomena on-ground. See also: electromagnetic bursts from nukes popping in orbit.

Not sure how much energy could be maximally put into the atmosphere by an Andromeda-located neutron star merger and what the consequences would be. Enough for an extinction event? Some PhD should do the calculations.

[JCitizen]

I was ignorant of the range of these events...

If you are anywhere near a galaxy hosting this event, especially with the poles of the burst aimed at you, then you are toast! I guess we now know what Revelations was describing when the heavens disappear in a roar of fire! Instead of looking for asteroids, maybe we should be looking for the systems with the mass to do this? Or maybe we'd really rather not know? What are you going to do about it anyway - especially if it comes like a thief in the night? How would you survive with all life and the atmosphere gone on planet earth? Hiding in the underground sounds like just delaying the inevitable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re. I was ignorant of the range of these events...

Not that it would help much, but the additional radiation would result in every nuclear plant, reprocessing plant, fissile material stored anywhere on the affected hemisphere and even weapons grade plutonium in missiles going into extreme meltdown if the rise time was fast enough.

This is actually more of a problem than the resulting mass extinction, imagine 200+ Chernobyls at the same time with lethal radiation lasting 200,000+ years located mostly on the land masses.

Yup, very bad for life on Earth and might indeed result in humanity going the way of the dinosaur.

I did the calculations and even a "small" Earth directed GRB would cause this perfect storm scenario.

Re. earlier comments about gravity, see http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.3761

Gravity waves can travel slightly faster than C under certain conditions and still be consistent with observations of binary neutron stars, in fact the calculated range is 0.8 to 1.2C with current estimates based on the radioactive decay anomaly being 1.07C