So there are apparently two 25,000 light year diameter gamma ray emitting bubbles extending above and below the plane of our galaxy. That wouldn’t be so unusual because, hey, space is weird. However, they seem to only be a few million years old.
If some alien civilization is fucking around trying to improve their HyperTV reception and cause things to go black for the rest of us in the process, I’m going to be pissed off. However, if they were defending the galaxy against some giant galaxy-eating amoeblob, I’m willing to give them a pass.
The Crab Nebula has erupted in an enormous flare five times more powerful than its previous outbursts and 30 times more energetic than its normal gamma-ray output, shaking the idea that it is a constant source of high energy radiation.
Several short-lived gamma-ray flares emanating from the Crab Nebula remnant had been detected by various space observatories since 2009 – and since the start of this year changes in X-ray brightness had also been noted – but on 12 April, NASA’s Fermi and the Italian Space Agency’s AGILE satellite watched as a “superflare” reached 30 times the background value of the remnant’s gamma-ray output. A second, even brighter, flare erupted on 16 April, with activity subsiding just two days later.
“These superflares are the most intense outbursts we’ve seen to date, and they are all extremely puzzling events,” says Alice Harding at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “We think they are caused by sudden rearrangements of the magnetic field not far from the neutron star, but exactly where that’s happening remains a mystery.”
Here in the Southern Hemisphere just this morning, Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter came to align in the morning sky, first time since 1910, and not expected to happen again until 2040, apparently.
Not yet. I thought I was in a great spot for it, the night is darker, the stars (and by extension the planests) light up really nicely because there is no metropolitan city lights where I live to light up the sky. The trouble is the tradewinds have picked up now, and there seems to be constant cloud cover.
There is already a squid from space. His name is C’thulhu and he is one of the Great Old Ones from beyond the stars. In his house at R’lyeh, dead C’thulhu waits dreaming.
