Dean's World

A little math. . .

The Sun powers itself by converting 4 million tons of matter into energy every single second through fusing hydrogen into helium. 4 million tons of water (to use a convenient standard for comparison) would fill a cube approximately 160 meters on each side.

Multiply that by:

60 seconds per minute
60 minutes per hour
24 hours per day
365.25 days per year (average)
100,000 years

= 3,155,760,000,000

times 4,000,000 tons

= 12,623,040,000,000,000,000 tons (1.26 x 10 to the 19th power tons). As a point of comparison, the Earth itself has a mass of approximately 6 times 10 to the 21st power tons.


In other words, as a rough approximation, the magnetar released in one-tenth of a second an amount of energy equivalent to what would be released by converting a cube of water with sides 2,300 kilometers long into energy.

Nice that we had 50,000 light years separating us and *that* little hiccup.

The scary thing is that this phenomenon isn't even close to being the largest explosion ever recorded--though fortunately the events that are are vanishingly rare. The release of energy by the magnetar was approximately 1.1 times 10 to the 39th power joules--using the mass estimate above and the familiar E = mc squared formula. A Type 1a supernova--which astronomers think is created by a white dwarf in a binary system drawing mass away from its companion star until it reaches the Chandrasekhar limit of 1.4 solar masses and literally blows itself into pieces in a massive carbon fusion reaction--can involve the release of as much as 10 to the 44th power joules--as much energy as the Sun will release during its entire 10 billion year life span. If one of those goes off anywhere near us (say, a few thousand light years) it will be a very bad day indeed for us.