10^53 ergs

[n2doc]

First time ever: scientists see jets as black hole swallows a star
By John Timmer | Published 24 minutes ago

Gamma ray bursts are produced by some of the most energetic objects in the Universe, such as stars collapsing into supernovae. NASA's SWIFT observatory is designed to catch these rare events as they unfold, with hardware and software that detect sudden spikes in high-energy photons and respond by pointing the main hardware at their source. In March of this year, a somewhat unusual object set off the observatory's gamma ray trigger, and then did something that the scientists running the hardware called "unheard of"—it set it off three more times in less than 48 hours.

Normally, things catch the SWIFT's attention by exploding, which is a one-time-only event, so the multiple triggering was already unusual. But looking through previous sweeps of the region showed that the source, called Sw 1644+57, was already present several days before setting off the trigger, and the source continued to emit prodigious X-rays for more than two weeks afterward. Also unusual was the variability of the emissions; the X-ray flux varied by a factor of two on timescales as short as 100 seconds.

Running the numbers on an unprecedented event

But the truly eye-popping figures came when researchers calculated the amount of energy released by Sw 1644+57. The brightest X-ray flare they detected pumped out over 10⁴⁸ergs/second, and the total output during the first 11 days is estimated at over 10⁵³ergs. For those of you not up on your ergs, that's over 10^30 megatons or, as the authors put it, "equivalent to ~10% of the rest energy of the Sun."

Any way you slice it, that's a lot of energy, and we haven't seen anything like it before. The papers that describe it are filled with superlatives that are a bit unusual in a scientific paper, with one saying that Sw 1644+57 is "well beyond the bright end of the quasar luminosity function" and "more luminous (by a factor of ~100) than flares from the brightest blazars."

more

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/06/first-time-ever-scientists-see-jets-as-black-hole-swallows-a-star.ars

[nichomachus]

1. Looks like a wormhole to me

[A Simple Game]

2. Will you please stop with the pictures n2doc?

I'm wearing out my computer changing the desktop background so much.

Just kidding, thanks for the pictures and the cartoons. I really appreciate all of them.

[DavidDvorkin]

3. I hope the star didn't have inhabited planets.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Who still uses ergs?

Did they just pick that unit to bump up the powers of 10 a bit?

[Bill McBlueState]

6. astronomers use cgs units

I don't know why, but we do. It's standard practice to plot spectral energy distributions in ergs/s/cm^2 versus microns.

[burrowowl]

5. K&R