Gamma Rays from Sun
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MurphyGuy
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Not a chance.
He's making it sound as if the sun just did something unusual... Hyperbole to get viewers. From the Sun's perspective, its doing the same thing its always done.. But from our perspective, this is new because we've never detected such high energies from the Sun before.. and we've never detected them because we never had the instruments to detect them until just recently.
And its probably not the sun producing them.. more likely its high energy cosmic rays originating outside our solar system that get turned around by the Sun's magnetic field in the same way our planet's magnetic field redirects radiation around us. (only a lot more magnetic power from the sun)
I don't think our Sun has enough mass to produce those kinds of energies when it collapses into a dwarf in 5 billion years, let alone during its normal cycle activity.. it takes a truly cosmic event to do that.. like a black hole or a supernova.
svetz
Works in theory! Practice? That's something else
I don't believe he's an expert by any means, but the underlying paper does make it sound like this is something new and unexpected rather than just not detected before. Hoping Sabine talks about it.
And Betelgeuse is expected to go anytime, but either way it's pretty darn exciting.
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MurphyGuy
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Well, I think it might be one of those "Duh" moments.. As a cosmic ray particle interacts with our Sun's magnetic field, it can be steered towards the earth, which makes it look like its coming from the Sun.. I'd guess that if it got close enough to the Sun's atmosphere, and if it slammed into something, it would transform into a shower of decay particles and become a sort of shotgun blast heading towards our detectors.
Remember the movie Star Trek where they had to save the whales? The Enterprise did a sling shot maneuver around the sun? I'd bet that's basically what is happening to these cosmic rays to one extent or another.
Gamma rays are electromagnetic and they travel in a straight line, their paths are affected only by the dent gravitational masses make in space-time, but high energy cosmic rays are actual particles and they can be affected by magnetic fields and be steered this way or that way.
I would be very surprised if it goes boom anytime within the next 1000 years.. but that would be damn cool to see..
Betelgeuse will probably turn into a neutron star, and with its mass, that's going to be an active one that will probably dazzle us for long time. Being so close to us, I suspect we might learn some new physics due to the observational opportunities.
500 light years is our backyard.. If it happens at the right time, it will be so bright that you might not need headlights to drive at night. And it will probably remain that way for weeks(?) before it dims out..
svetz
Works in theory! Practice? That's something else
Sun blasts out highest-energy radiation ever recorded, raising questions for solar physics
"We thought we had this star figured out, but that's not the case."
MurphyGuy
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They're going to have a difficult time explaining how the sun produces such high energies.. It just doesn't seem possible without at least 6 to 10 solar masses...Sun blasts out highest-energy radiation ever recorded, raising questions for solar physics
"We thought we had this star figured out, but that's not the case."www.space.com
I'm going with cosmic ray slams into sun and produces a decay shower of gamma and other crap that heads in our direction.... The process happens in our upper atmosphere all day long every day.
In fact, we kind of make use of this process to fight terrorism.. of all things.
svetz
Works in theory! Practice? That's something else
Definitely something to watch, even if it's not some cool phenomena we've never understood it's still nice to see there are new things to understand. A "reflection" would be subject to inverse squared losses, so such a strong known source should be obvious, so I suspect something else. But no idea what.
MurphyGuy
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Not necessarily a "bounce" or a reflection.. In fact, I suspect if a cosmic ray hit the sun FROM our direction, its decay shower would just end up in the sun or be flung away from Earth in whatever deflection angle was appropriate.
More likely this is a deflection where a cosmic ray is heading towards Earth from the general area behind the sun or even perpendicular to the axis between the Earth and Sun maybe, and the sun's influence performs a bit of a magnetic slingshot maneuver and aims it at us.
Pretty much the same thing that happens inside an old television.. Charged plates are used to steer a beam of electrons to the phosphorous screen in front. The stronger the charge on the plate, the more the beam of electrons are deflected.
I would guess that how this plays out with the Sun and a relativistic proton zipping by is a function of the angle of the incoming particle, and its relative position to whatever magnetic field line it is near when it slams into something and creates a decay shower.
And notice he said high energy Gamma.. Cosmic rays are physical particles like protons.. not electromagnetic energy like Gamma.. the gamma doesn't happen until they slam into another atomic nucleus, which then causes a shower of decay particles and electromagnetic radiation like Gamma.
This happens all day long every day in our upper atmosphere.. cosmic rays slam into some random atom up there and create a shower of decay crap that rains down on us. As you are reading this, a few hundred muons just zipped through your body along with a few billion neutrinos.
So the next question you might ask is "How do they know its coming from the sun then and not our own atmosphere"? That would most likely be the fact that the shower lacks Muons. Muon's are short lived with a life span of something like a few microseconds. When cosmic rays hit our atmosphere, that few microseconds is enough for the near light speed muons to hit the surface of our planet.. but they wouldn't be able to travel all the way from the Sun.. any decay shower we get from the Sun would lack a Muon component, and (I'm guessing), have an increased neutrino concentration along with an electron since muons decay into neutrinos and electrons.
I know of no physics that could have our Sun generating anything with such high energies.. It takes a core collapse of something way more massive than our Sun to make that kind of stuff.. or something being flung out by a black hole maybe(?)
svetz
Works in theory! Practice? That's something else
Given the orbital speed of the Earth, I would see that more as a one-time event from a powerful source.
I saw a theory years ago that cosmic rays hitting the sun cause gamma ray bursts.... hmmm... ah... here it is.
MurphyGuy
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Cosmic rays are everywhere in space and they zoom around in every direction so I'd be surprised if we found that anything involving cosmic rays was a one-time event in that respect.
That article makes a lot of sense.. I should point out that the exact phrase "gamma ray burst" (frequently abbreviated as GRB) should not be used in such context as that phrase denotes a special and relatively rare cosmic event. "Gamma ray shower" or "burst in gamma flux" or various other phrases would be fine, but GRB is a highly specialized event and has its own book shelf dedicated to it.
One interesting tidbit regarding our ignorance as to what the sun is capable of doing with a bit of help from the cosmos... We still don't know why the corona is so much hotter than the surface of the sun. We have some ideas, but no proof to back them up.. and since the corona is the first thing anything heading towards the sun interacts with, there's a bit of a mystery there.
And we're not talking about the corona being a bit warmer than the surface of the sun, the corona is hundreds of times hotter, and we're not sure why.
It seems reasonable to expect that whatever mechanism is causing the phenomenon might create some other interesting effects we don't expect. For example, what would happen when a particle with a stupidly ridiculous amount of energy from the cosmos slams into that plasma.. Actually, probably nothing notable in my example, but I'm just pointing out that there are processes we don't fully understand that could create effects we don't expect.
If we get enough of these types of detectors dotting our planet, we might learn something new.. Like how we learned that certain types of ground waves precede major earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, maybe we can figure out how to predict large solar flares or CME's.
MurphyGuy
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Don't count on a 5th force.. The measurements they're talking about are so small its hard to comprehend.
At that quantum level, particle pairs are popping into and out of existence all the time.. We're talking planck scale femtosecond stuff.
I'll make a prediction and say that the discrepancy is most likely a quantum effect we didn't predict.. or one that has a larger affect than we predicted.. as opposed to a new fundamental force.
svetz
Works in theory! Practice? That's something else
I didn't link that video for the 5th force segment, she had a bit about the thread topic at the linked timestamp.
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