If you can’t take a bloody nose, go home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross but it’s not for the timid.

Robert Miles has gone quite a way's in musical experimentation with '23AM' and except for 'Children', this CD surpasses it's predecessor. The first three collections ('Introducing', 'A New Flower' and 'Everyday Life') are filled with layers of muted musical sound effects and keyboards all encompassing noise effects like.

-Q In my book, Death from the Skies!, I don’t spend much time discussing magnetars. Although terrifying — able to generate truly mind-numbing outbursts which I’ll describe in a moment — they are simply too rare and too far away to be much of a threat.

Yeah, well, I might’ve been wrong. A little wrong, I mean; there’s no reason to panic. Life on Earth won’t be snuffed out by some rogue magnetar blasting away our atmosphere or anything like that. But one of my main premises for feeling completely safe has been eroded a bit, and to be fair I should talk about it.

Magnetars are neutron stars, superdense balls of tightly packed neutrons left over from the collapsed core of a massive star that’s gone supernova. Neutron stars have about the mass of the Sun but are only a few kilometers across, making them fantastically dense and giving them surface gravities that can be billions of times the force you feel standing on the Earth. They also can possess magnetic fields literally trillions of times stronger than the Earth’s. And in some cases, young neutron stars can be even more powerful: their field strength might be a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) times the Earth’s! These beasts, called magnetars, probably lose that field strength rapidly, decaying in only a few thousand years. That makes them rare on a galactic scale.

Still, several are known to exist. And they can have a nasty, nasty temper. See, the magnetic field is coupled to the crust of the neutron star. The crust is extremely rigid and under vast pressure from the gravity of the star.

If the crust cracks — a starquake, if you will — the energy released makes the strongest earthquake ever recorded on our planet look like a friendly pat on the back. I once calculated the strength of such a starquake, and it would register as magnitude 32 on the Richter scale. This ultraviolent blast shakes the magnetic field of the star, which in turn reacts by slamming around subatomic particles the bottom line is that such an event can trigger a phenomenal release of X-ray energy from the star. And by 'phenomenal' I mean 'pants-wetting terrifying'.

In December 2004, the magnetar SGR 1806-20 underwent such a starquake. In one-tenth of a second the subsequent blast released something like 2 times 10 46 ergs of energy — equal to about 50 trillion times the Sun’s output during that same period. This star sits about 50,000 light years from the Earth: literally halfway across the Milky Way galaxy from us. Yet, even from that forbidding distance, this titanic event was able to physically affect the Earth.

It compressed our magnetic field and partially ionized our atmosphere, causing it to puff up measurably. Mind you, it was 500 quadrillion kilometers (300 quadrillion miles) from us at the time. So you can see why these things are a bit unnerving. But really, this one is so far away! Sure, it can hurt us, but at that distance really all it can do is what it did; we don’t expect it can have a bigger event, so we’re safe enough. Moreover, these objects are so bright in X-rays that we think we’ve found all the really big bruisers in the Galaxy. If one were closer to us, there’s no way to hide it.

Yeah, about that they found a new magnetar, named SGR 0501+4516, and it’s only 15,000 light years away. It turns out to be dark most of the time, emitting very little energy, which is how it escaped detection. But it had an outburst last year that lasted four months, allowing scientists time detect it and to get a good long look at it. This event was far less violent than the one from SGR 1806 in 2004, but still nothing to sneeze. Is it capable of an SGR 1806-like event?

Probably not — that was an extraordinary event — and I certainly hope not! At 1/3 the distance, the effects on Earth would be nine times as strong.

That could damage satellites and possibly even cause some effects on Earth itself — probably nothing that would be too big a deal, but still. The thing is, in Death from the Skies!, I said we’re safe from these things because they’re far away, and it’s not possible to hide any closer to us.

Yet here is this one, three times closer than SGR 1806. It makes me wonder if there are any closer still. If one were, say, 5000 light years away and had a blast like the one in 2004, the effects would be 100 times larger!

There could be serious satellite damage, and possibly even blackouts on Earth due to electric currents induced in our power grid. Let me be clear: I seriously doubt there’s anything that close to us.

This new one at 15,000 light years is something of a fluke, and it’s entirely possible it’s not capable of the same kind of explosive event as its more distant cousin. The odds of one being even closer are pretty small, so I’m not too concerned about it.

If I were, believe me, I’d let you know! The point here is that we have to be careful when we talk in absolutes, and it’s always good to question assumptions. If there’s one thing we know for sure about the Universe, it’s that it’s capable of some pretty good surprises, and not all of them need be the happy fun kind. We’re almost certainly safe from this particular threat but maybe a little kick in the complacency isn’t always such a bad thing. Image credit: NASA. OK, dumb question.

What’s a magnetar made of? I’m always hearing about how incredibly dense a neutron star is. I’m familiar with the periodic table. Always thought that, aside from the extreme upper elements that we’re able to create in colliders, it pretty much ended at plutonium or thereabouts, correct? So what elements make up the crust of a neutron star?

Impossilbe to know? Any theories? Or does normal elemental science just curl up in a ball, suck its thumb and cry for its Mama cause none of the usual rules apply? I think it is funny how the article mentions that “if a magnetar were to magically appear at half the Moon’s distance from Earth, its magnetic field would wipe the details off every credit card on Earth.” As if our credit cards would be our main concern with one of these terrifying beasts that close to us @Brian: I could be wrong, but I believe the “curl in a ball, suck its thumb, and cry for Mama” idea is the correct one there.

Neutron stars, from what I understand, as just big balls of highly condensed neutrons (neutral sub-atomic particles). Its about as dense as matter can get before it goes black hole. In December 2004, the magnetar SGR 1806-20 underwent such a starquake. In one-tenth of a second the subsequent blast released something like 2 times 10^46 ergs of energy — equal to about 50 trillion times the Sun’s output during that same period. From a large-number perspective, I found this to be overwhelming.

So I did my own calculations, and found that the magnetar’s energy output in that one-tenth of a second is equal to the sun’s total output since we decided to come down from the trees and start walking a bit more upright (approx. 158,000 years ago). Edit: scratch that – maybe it was more around the time we started using tools. Someone help me out here.

Brian M, Neutron stars are formed when high mass stars create iron in the core. Iron can’t fusion nor fission, so there’s no way for the core to produce energy and thus balance the inward force of gravity by the outward force of thermal and radiative pressure. So the core collapses due to gravity and reaches a point where it’s so dense that electrons and protons are forced together to form neutrons. That process releases huge amounts of neutrinos which trigger the supernova explosion that blows away the outer layers. The core of now neutrons keeps collapsing. If neutron degeneracy pressure is enough to stop gravity, you get a neutron star. Neutron degeneracy pressure is due to the quantum mechanics and the fact that neutrons don’t like to have the exact same energy (in a similar way that electrons don’t).

There has to be some charges still left on the magnetar in order to create the magnetic field as magnetic fields are created by moving charges. I think you need to release a second, revised edition of Death From The Skies which, BTW, I will be picking up from the local bookstore here in Squamish, tomorrow!

And by “phenomenal” I mean “pants-wetting terrifying”. Umm, well I hate to break it to you, but for me it’s “pants-crappingly” terrifying Do you have any suggestions on how to remove the brown stain from my pants, or should I just send you the bill In all seriousness, this is truly mind blowing, that we live in a Universe where such forces even exist! I think this is beyond our comprehension in many ways. It’s hard to imagine that an object 50,000 LY away can have a physical effect upon the Earth! Heh I love it. My next 365 Days podcast is about magnetars; when I produced it a month ago, this new one hadn’t yet been announced cool beans! What is so interesting about these things is that they were first detected decades ago, but at the time we didn’t have the cool techno stuff we do now for monitoring these babies.

The truth is, there are likely lots of these guys out there and, the good news (if such thing can be good) is that many of them are weaker than the big one halfway across the galaxy, and more are like the new one — sorta weak and not so blustery. They tend to “wear down” after a while.

A few details regarding Neutron stars. The outer portion of the star is a mix of neutrons, ions, atomic nuclei, and protons. This region is fairly thin, perhaps a kilometer or two.

The name Neutron Star is a bit misleading, as these stars are not made up completely of neutrons. In fact, if they were, they would not have a magnetic field, which requires some sort of conductivity. So, you have to have something other than just neutrons. The University of Oregon has a good, brief tutorial here:. There is a longer, and much more detailed article on Wikipedia.

Brian M said: OK, dumb question. What’s a magnetar made of?

I’m always hearing about how incredibly dense a neutron star is. I’m familiar with the periodic table. Always thought that, aside from the extreme upper elements that we’re able to create in colliders, it pretty much ended at plutonium or thereabouts, correct? So what elements make up the crust of a neutron star? Impossilbe to know? Any theories? Or does normal elemental science just curl up in a ball, suck its thumb and cry for its Mama cause none of the usual rules apply?

This is not such a dumb question if you’ve never read much about neutron stars. The intense gravitational pressure that forms a neutron star is actually larger than the electron degeneracy pressure that supports, say, a white dwarf (neutron stars are typically more massive than white dwarfs). It’s a bit more complicated than this in reality, but go and read DftS for a bit more detail about how a supernova forms something really, really dense. Anyhow, once the force is strong enough, it forces the electrons to combine with protons and form neutrons.

Thus, most of the matter in a neutron star is a degenerate sea of neutrons. With almost no protons and no electrons, normal chemistry does not happen. The crust of a neutron star will typically be iron. Cindy (10) beat me to it.

Cindy said: Iron can’t fusion nor fission, so there’s no way for the core to produce energy and thus balance the inward force of gravity by the outward force of thermal and radiative pressure. This isn’t quite true. Iron can fuse (otherwise, how could we ever have Cobalt, Nickel, Copper, Zinc, Gallium, Germanium, Arsenic, Selenium, Bromine, Krypton, Rubidium, Strontium, Yttrium, Zirconium, Niobium, Molybdenum etc. However, in so doing it takes in energy rather than emitting energy. This is why elements heavier than iron are only ever made by supernovae – the intense shock waves that pass through the material during the supernova explosion are able to compress it for just long enough to force some of the iron to fuse into heavier elements.

It also explains why these heavier elements are so much rarer than the lighter ones. Any more news on the threat posed by that Wolf Rayet potential gamma ray supernova burster? The one the BA posted about ages ago – last year or before if memory serves. What was it called WR-104 I think?

Some sort of binary with a weird spiral shape flowing off from it right? Which is a worse threat, BA, this new magnetar or that W type star from last year? @ 16 Michael L: ” It’s hard to imagine that an object 50,000 LY away can have a physical effect upon the Earth!” Didn’t you read Phil’s book where he talked about the Andromeda Galaxy – Messier 31 -which will actually collide with our own Galaxy and perhaps eject our whole solar system or even sling it into the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole?

That’s even further away at 2 million light years distant at least it is for now! 😉 Mind you, M31 is a whole galaxy bigger than our own not just a city-sized stellar corpse (As they said on an ep of The Simpsons – DMY: Don’t Mess Yourself, Michael L., not again!

Here’s a contest with a macabre twist – What’s the most distant, furthest away object that could effect the Earth possibly in a catastrophic way bringing (Taa-Daahh!) ‘Death From The Skies’??? Nominees for the “Plait Catastrophe Plate” award so far: 1) that explosive Wolf Rayet star, WR-104? 2) Eta Carinae possible supernova- Gamma ray burster? 3) This new found Magnetar? (BTW what’s the bet we get a car named the ‘Magnetar’ after it. We’ve already had the something or other brand pulsar!) 4) Our Milky Way Galaxy’s Central Galactic Core – if it awakens to Active Galaxy / Seyfert /Quasar type activity somehow.? & now 5) the Andromeda Galaxy, Messier M31 itself.

Any advance (if that’s the word) on that? Can anything top two million light years as a potential threat to Earth posing distance? @ # 27 – Nigel Depledge: This is why elements heavier than iron are only ever made by supernovae – the intense shock waves that pass through the material during the supernova explosion are able to compress it for just long enough to force some of the iron to fuse into heavier elements. It also explains why these heavier elements are so much rarer than the lighter ones. You forgot the words “naturally made” there – humans have created other elements artificially in labs, incl. One just recently made for the first time Good post otherwise, I just think its worth mentioning that we humans can already beat the cosmos at the elemental (NOT element~ary!) nucleosynthesis creation game when it comes to substances like Americum, Einsteinium, Berkellium, etc.

8) Incidentally, I wish the BA had posted on that news (new artificial element) too or did I just miss it? Oh & why, yes, I am indeed a nit-picking, literalistic, green-blooded, pointy-eared pedant! When you say that “I seriously doubt there’s anything that close to us” I am assuming that you are basing this upon: 1.

The rarity of Magnetars, 2. The fact that they arise from Supernovae as a form of Neutron Star, and 3. Given their origins, their distribution would not be homogeneous but -rather- more densely clustered towards the older stars in the Milky Way and not really, necessarily, near us. Is this correct? If so, the smaller example 15,000 Light Years from us: what effects do you think it has had on our planet in the past?

Has anyone done any geologic research to see if it has left any “fingerprints” behind? Or would it be so weak (even at its relatively close distance) that it wouldn’t be able to do so?

Curiously yours, Sylvan (Dave). Understanding what a neutron star is made of is, to say the least, a very tricky business. The equation of state (that is, the mathematical relationship between fundamental quantities such as density, pressure, temperature, etc.) is way, WAY outside what we can test in the lab.

Add to the fact that in such strongly curved spacetime it’s all deep into the nonlinear analytical morass of General Relativity, and you have a real stinker of a physics problem on your hands. Consider, for example, just the complication that arises from the fact that the way the neutrons are arranged won’t even correspond to the sort of closest packing of spheres rules that we are used to in Euclidean (flat space) geometry. So, ask a half dozen neutron star wonks what the density of a neutron star is, and you might get six (or more) answers.

But if SGR 1806-20 was a minor 2.0 – 2.9 on the Plait magnetar scale (analogous to the Richter scale: “Generally not felt, but recorded.”), then SGR 0501+4516 can at most be a 3.0 – 3.9 (“Often felt, but rarely causes damage”) and the hypothetical close magnetar a light 4.0-4.9 (“Noticeable shaking of indoor items, rattling noises. Significant damage unlikely”). 😮 I can’t seem to be even a *little* frightened for unlikely damage, even if global. It isn’t just me that can get a piece of the roof in my head, it will be all of us.) But anyway I will probably be scared by the shaking furniture when it actually happens. Maybe it was more around the time we started using tools. Someone help me out here. Delighted to.

Well, already australopithecines are believed to move quite well as bipeds ~ 4 Ma, both from skeletal traits and several famous sets of footprints (“Laetoli footprints”). It is debated if they were obligate (aka “always” or “preferably”, I think) bipeds, but in any case the functional ability predated a consistent tool culture. As it happens, a consistent tool culture seems to be the “fossil trait” that defines humans as Homo for anthropologists. Other apes, birds, et cetera uses tools, but adopts them by social learning (from “aping” others), not communicative learning, which may explain why these tool cultures don’t persist.

Likely they don’t spread efficiently enough, which is consistent with the localized cultures observed. Homo habilis, the first consistent tool culture ape, is ~ 2.5 Ma. Your ~ 0.2 Ma was indeed roughly when H. Sapiens sapiens burst onto the scene. ~ 0.5 Ma is when neanderthal and sapiens diverged.

That is the approximate date of the last common ancestor, whoever he was, based on both DNA and fossils.) While I don’t think there are any widely held traits that identifies sapiens as such nor can it be due to this time gap in the record, both fossil morphology and DNA has been used to differentiate between the two known groups. Personally I (a layman) don’t see any truly dramatic functional difference, AFAIU now they even have found traces of the probably same type of “voice box”. Except possibly that humans matured faster – we probably survived because we outbreed our competitors/bad environment.

[Speaking of a *little* frightened, IIRC DNA analysis says we, for some reason or other, survived a bottle neck with efficiently a mere ~ 2000 sapiens. Maybe it was then our predilection for early sex maturation was established.] The tool cultures differ more, as I understand it – IIRC no arrows et cetera among neanderthal. I’m not astronomer, but based on Phil Plaits information it would require a Magnetar to be pretty close to due some serious damage to life on earth. I’m not against excluding external distant events from causing a mass extinction but in the history of life on earth most mass extinctions where gradual events (at the behest of provoking perturbed professional paleontologists) sometimes assisted by a more local cosmic event (like really local). Death from the skies might cause some death but life on earth has a nasty habbit of killing itself off frequently in conjunction with geologic events on earth (example Permian-Triassiac event). Based on what I’ve researched extra-solar events as possible causes of extinctions are that they are a fairly new concept and it’s hard to find evidence other than I suspect it would cause a sudden (in geologic terms) die off of life on earth. However, as good as life is at killing itself off, there is so much diversity that it springs back pretty quickly.

I personally put death by Magnetar well below the possibility of me accidently triggering a nuclear war by detonating a nuclear device I made from hundreds of fire alarms and some uranium ore. The University of Oregon has a good, brief tutorial Ah, thanks. From the last thread on neutron stars IIRC the mechanism of magnetic field was raised but AFAIU not given a decided answer.

I see that I probably got the compression and frozen field correct, hasn’t bothered to check. However if the astrophysicists maintain that conductivity is needed then neutron star bulk matter must be paramagnetic instead of in the coupled ferromagnetic state I assumed was needed for a frozen field. (Had forgotten all about conducting liquid magnetic field trapping. D’oh!) That makes sense, as these stars can be assumed still hot by contraction and what not, at least in the beginning. “The temperature inside a newly formed neutron star is from around 10^11 to 10^12 Kelvin.” [Wikipedia.] Yikes, that is hot! Glad to have gotten that straightened out. In the face of the universe we are going to have to learn to impetuously nod our heads without consequently breaking our necks I’m not sure I’m more afraid of the fact that someone working for Discovery mag knows about this and has not been hired by someone else yet.

Or The fact that the writer doesn’t know we are all just trying to survive on every level every day even cosmically since year one. Honestly don’t worry about being fried, intrigue yourself with the glorious stars, that’s what they are there for. But seriously? If your going to burn in a “CATACLYSMIC DEATH STAR MATCH UP” you can only cease and desist?

It’s not like anyone on Earth has the knowledge or power to stop anything cosmic. @ Spectroscope # 34 “Good post otherwise, I just think its worth mentioning that we humans can already beat the cosmos at the elemental (NOT element~ary!) nucleosynthesis creation game when it comes to substances like Americum, Einsteinium, Berkellium, etc.” Just curious (I’m a mere engineer) – could these ‘man-made’ elements (and yet heavier elements) have occured naturally, perhaps in particularly violent regions of the universe? Minecraft Cars Mod Auto Installer Download Free Software Programs Online there. Is there any theoretical end to the periodic table, or could we keep fusing atoms till the cows come home making ever heavier elements, limited only by our ability to come up with decent element names? @Liam, At the risk of sounding like a complete ignoramus (I never even finished college), I believe that the huge, and ever increasing, amounts of energy required to get ever-heavier lumps of particles to form new elements runs into a roadblock as the required energy of fusion gets to be large enough to quarkify the elementary particles. Also, I seem to recall that there are certain ratios of protons to neutrons which are more stable, but even these are so violently radioactive that new elements exist in particle accelerators, and theoretically in the hearts of supernovae, only for fractions of moments. So it was magnetic particles that “compressed our magnetic field and partially ionized our atmosphere, causing it to puff up measurably”, or some kind of plasma?

So this ‘stuff’ has been hurtling through space for 50,000 years? How wide a swath do you think it created? Do we have instruments that could image the path? It’s obviously pushed stuff out of the way in order to impact our magnetic field. Would taking measurements from both sides of Earth’s orbit help?

The solar system is moving at 251 km/s around the galaxy, so it’s traveled roughly (251*31,556,925*50000) 396,039,408,750,000 km or 244,468,770,833,333.33 miles or 41.86 light years just to get smacked by the magnetar. I would think that Nature has indeed created all the same isotopes that Man has made in the lab. It’s just that the total supply of these elements, which all have very short half-lives, had decayed long before man arrived on the scene. A lot of time has passed between the super-nova that created all the elements in our solar-system and now. Plenty of time for anything heavier than uranium to be down to its last three atoms by now. (Please correct me if I’m wrong about that, especially if we do encounter “natural” elements heavier than uranium. I’d love to know more.).

@Alan#61: Good question also. I’m still waiting for Phil to chime in and tell us what would happen if a Magnetaur exploded next to us (say, within a few thousand light years). I want to hear the doom and gloom of how my flesh will be torn off from me as I see giant magnets go into geocentric orbit.

If they are as dangerous / deadly as assumed, that means we’d have to take that into account when talking about how many possible civilizations or life there is elsewhere in the galaxy. We’d have to create “assumed deadzones” where carbon based or “Earth-like” life wouldn’t be able to form. Anyway, great topic! Spectroscope (34) said: Bzzt! You forgot the words “naturally made” there – humans have created other elements artificially in labs, incl. One just recently made for the first time Good post otherwise, I just think its worth mentioning that we humans can already beat the cosmos at the elemental (NOT element~ary!) nucleosynthesis creation game when it comes to substances like Americum, Einsteinium, Berkellium, etc Darn it. I meant to mention particle colliders and nuclear reactors, but my train of thought led me elsewhere before I had committed that thought to erm electrons.

Of course, plutonium was the first artificial element (wasn’t it first detected at the University of Chicago after they analysed the outcome of the first atomic pile?), but I think most of the actinides are artificial. Certainly the transuranics are. Well, unless you count the natural fission reactions that occurred a few million years ago in uranium deposits beneath Oklo. Larger stars are shorter lived, and there are plenty of them around. You don’t have to be -much- larger than the sun to make a supernova and a neutron star. I presume the risk of the supernova itself includes forming the magnetar, so that’s already on the books – I mean in The Book.

And since we haven’t BEEN wiped out by X-rays in the last 4 billion years – assuming there aren’t any past inadequately explained mass extinctions I forgot – our local magnetars probably have behaved themselves. (If there was mass extinction on just one hemisphere, and if it was the time of the one supercontinent, would that appear in the fossil record, or would animals and plants from outside the exterminated zone have moved in straight away, so that you couldn’t tell in the fossil record that anything happened? I mean, if you have a one decade time-lapse camera watching the World Trade Center uh. -really- bad example?!) I suppose the problem with dating stuff that happened outside the Solar System is that it depends how far away the thing is and you don’t -know- that, necessarily. So putting it on a cosmic timeline as 55,000 years ago is liable to be revised. And that’s -before- you bring in relativity, and what if you went in a spaceship to the object at the speed of light while your twin brother stayed home What you do know is when you saw it. “The point here is that we have to be careful when we talk in absolutes, and it’s always good to question assumptions.” This is a principal difficulty in debate with Muggle, I mean, non-scientific folk.

If you look around carefully, you will note that all proper observations include the method of observation, that all measurements have uncertainty factors, and that only standards are exact. “Exact” means a definition, with no uncertainty about it. In short, there is no such thing as certainty other than by definition, a conceit of ours.

You do not know where you came from, how you got here or where you’re going. You know you can fooled, sometimes in comic fashion by someone like Randi. You don’t even know how tall you are with the precision you routinely demand of companies you do business with. Don’t let your eyes and ego lie to you about things you must infer. @Stone Age Scientist If you look at light as photons, the answer becomes clear: Picture individual photons all bursting out from a point source, in all directions. They will all keep on travelling at the same speed ( c) until they hit something. But the distance between individual photons increases as they travel away from that point source.

So the number of photons passing through a given area drops with the square of the distance from the source. So that’s how light can keep travelling at the same speed, yet become weaker. Or to put it another way: Light doesn’t get “tired” as it travels, it just disperses over a larger area. Autumn: Ignoramus means someone dedicated to NOT learning.

As long as you’re trying, you’re not that,,, College degrees are for one principle purpose, to provide accreditation attesting to the “fact” of ones education. A continuing pursuit of knowledge is the principle reason for libraries. Self education is the ideal,,, 69. Robert Carnegie: As far as mass extinctions go, you might find the following link interesting,,, It’s a pretty good look at the 19 major extinction events of the past few billion years,,,how fast they happened and likely causes. Thanks Stuart van Onselen @ #74, Yes, I now understand how the distance between photons increases as they travel away from the point of origin. I was mulling over this when it occured to me that this is the underlying principle behind the dimming of light you’re talking about.

Still, I have to point out that when you wrote, “ They will all keep on travelling at the same speed (c) until they hit something,” it wasn’t at all clear why this was immediately a given constant. I can imagine a starship traversing space in constant light speed. Ac Delco Car Battery Serial Number there. But since photons have no propulsion drive, what makes an individual photon travel at uniform speed all throughout its journey in space?

(Please bear my curiosity. Stone Age Scientist said: I can imagine a starship traversing space in constant light speed. But since photons have no propulsion drive, what makes an individual photon travel at uniform speed all throughout its journey in space? (Please bear my curiosity. Thanks) Nothing that has mass can be accelerated to light speed. Photons are massless and, through a vacuum, will always travel at c whatever your frame of reference. The reason that macroscopic objects usually slow down as they travel is because energy is being transferred from them to something else (e.g.

If you take your foot off the gas pedal of your car, it will slow down, because it loses energy as heat to friction with the air, friction with the road and friction between internal moving parts). However, light is quantised. A photon cannot transfer part of its energy to something else.

It is an all-or-nothing affair. Either a photon is absorbed, or it is not, and continues travelling at c. Now, photons do lose energy as they travel large distances, because their energy is related to wavelength, and their wavelength is stretched by the expansion of the universe as they travel (this is essentially the Doppler effect). In the midst of all these back-and-forth comments about magnetars, I’m concerned that nobody has given proper credit to the two astrophysicists who coined the term and conceived that these objects exist. I’m referring to Rob Duncan and Chris Thompson, who met with tremendous skepticism from the astrophysics community when they first defined the physical properties of highly magnetic neutron stars. Their groundbreaking physics work gave younger scientists a leg up on their careers, but I very rarely see proper attribution or credit in the popular press. So remember, when you think “magnetar,” think “Duncan, R., and Thompson, C.” It’s the decent thing to do.

“Upload this to YouTube so we can watch it!” One of Pete Best’s men in black called to the cadre of camcorders in the audience in the Threadgill’s garden on a sticky June night. The greybeards and scraggly ponytailed ones nodded back agreeably at the guitarist as the band slid into “Till There Was You.” “Why aren’t there more people here? He was a Beatle!” KGSR program director Jody Denberg and I muttered to each other as the band ably shifted into “Rock & Roll Music.” The old hippies in the crowd were game enough and when the Pete Best Band struck up “Twist and Shout,” the audience did just that. If you’re not a fan of the early Beatles, it helps to know that like most of the early Sixties bands, they were a largely a jukebox band. Then-booking agent Allan Williams hired Pete Best as the Silver Beatles’ first full-time drummer in 1960.

The “Silver” part was soon dropped but Best sat in a crucial position for the band as the drummer on the Decca demos and those brutal gigs and live recordings in Hamburg, the period that forever shaped the Beatles’ sound. Best also played numerous Cavern gigs with the Beatles and was onboard when they backed up Tony Sheridan on “My Bonnie.” Best’s displacement by new manager Brian Epstein in late 1962 has been attributed to personality conflicts, questionable musicianship, and band jealousy. Whether it was any one or a combination of those is lost to history. Best continued to perform and record but with little success and seemed to drop from sight by the Seventies. It’s no big secret, though some haven’t figured it out, that I’m a Deadhead.

No, not one of those. I went to about 20 or 30 shows from 1972 to 1994, and I still listen to a lot of their music, but I was never fanatical to the point of going on tour, collecting tapes, or digging too deep into the mythology. I was just into the music. It’s a jones that’s been continually fed with a remarkable stream of live releases and box sets since Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995. The latest, Three From the Vault (Rhino), was released this week and while it’s an interesting set, the real story, at least to me, is the changes apparent since Rhino has taken over the release of the Dead’s archival material. 1991 saw the release of the original One From the Vault, quickly followed by Two.

An extraordinary 53 live albums followed, which ranged from complete individual concerts to compilations from specific tours to career-spanning box sets. Most of those, especially the Dick’s Picks series, which is now up to #36, were woefully lacking in any historical context or liner notes. In a WORLD EXCLUSIVE!, Revolver, “The World’s Loudest Rock Magazine,” announced earlier this year that the planets aligned for the creation of the “ultimate metal supergroup!” Its members? Paid staff columnist and Dallas-native Vinnie Paul (who fields hard hitting journalistic inquiries like, “If you were gay, who’s the first dude you would bone?”), Mudvayne’s Chad Gray and guitarist Greg Tribbet, previously known as Kud and Gurrg, respectively, during their masked nu-metal heyday, and some dudes from Nothingface. The problem is that nothing about (caps intentional), is, in fact, super. Gray is an even more one-dimensional vocalist than Damageplan’s Pat Lachman, while his attempts at Texas thrash are simply laughable. It takes more than whiskey and weed to sound like a true cowboy from hell.

That’s one of the reasons that Rebel Meets Rebel, the collaboration between David Allen Coe and Pantera’s rhythm section, which included the late, great Dimebag Darrell, as well as bassist Rex Brown, sounded so raw and real. Those were true musical outlaws forging an alliance at a unique crossroads. In contrast, HELLYEAH is nothing more than another forgettable Mudvayne album. After all, Matt McDonough (sPaG) is actually a pretty decent drummer. Taking a cue from John and Yoko's ubiquitous Vietnam-era slogan, Attack Formation now has a shirt to express your views, perhaps of our current war, as seen on the right here. 'There isn't going to be any [Attack Formation] logo or our name,' says frontman Ben Webster. 'All the money we make off the shirts goes to make more shirts.

To me, besides talking trash or joining in the apathy, not too many people in music are making an effort. I just wanted to do something that would reflect our viewpoint.' Just in time for summer! The shirts will be available at Attack Formation shows (like tomorrow's at Emo's), and if you want to reach out and touch someone, hit up. If you missed Jandek's stellar performance during SXSW, here's another chance. Saturday, July 21, the Tall Pale One plays Fort Worth's historic, just north of downtown.

Tickets can be purchased at Good Records in Dallas, or at our own beloved End of an Ear. And the backing band – Susan Alcorn on pedal steel and guitar, Ralph White on banjo/fiddle, Ryan Williams of the Baptist Generals on bass, and Will Johnson of Centro-Matic on drums – ain't too shabby either. Friday night, Emo’s: First drink spilled on myself at roughly 10:30pm. But it was done in a rush to get away from the wankfest organized by Orthrelm guitarist Mick Barr. Dude can noodle. Later, 'round midnight, Gang Gang Dance cleansed the hippie/hipster masses with cerebral electro/rave/space waves, and a confused passerby in a “You Looked Better on MySpace” T-shirt spilled part of his drink on me.

Nevertheless, GGD were engaging, if only for those in an altered state. Geez, but what do they sound like?

Well, as one friend put it, “Like Animal Collective being chased through SeaWorld by my Jamaican landlord.” At one point a guy up front tried feeling up his female companion during a tribal drum solo. The Glorium reunion outside was a far tamer affair, save for singer Paul Streckfus whipping his mic chord around in a jaunty, lascivious manner. Equally unclassifiable was Sunday's final anniversary show. Radio Birdman easily sold out the inside, but it was more surprising that Battles was moved outside. Halfway through 'Atlas,' from their excellent Warp debut Mirrored, the power went out, almost as if someone had willed it so that the whole crowd could scream the screwed sing-song beat. We stood there in the dark for a good five minutes before the power slowly returned and someone dropped their beer nearby. Ennio Morricone, 78, dwarfed by a visibly bemused Clint Eastwood, nevertheless cut a monumental figure onstage at the Academy Awards in February.

Receiving an honorary Oscar “for his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music,” the Rome native’s public profile – practically speaking – lost out 40 years ago to a whistled refrain from Sergio Leone’s grimy West world. Getting a glimpse of Morricone felt like John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing, one of composer’s most compelling film scores: There he stood, in the flesh. Morricone’s sonic alchemy endures in copious modern soundtracks, from Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to the epic, statuette-nominated The Mission.

2005’s Ipecac-sponsored Crime and Dissonance found avant-spazzmen John Zorn and Mike Patton on the compilation tip of the maestro’s universal ear, as one ripe example. Were that Morricone’s grand precursor, Milan-born Nino Rota, Federico Fellini’s musical wingman for nearly 30 years, was equally celebrated contemporarily. The Ultimate Best of Federico Fellini & Nino Rota: Originals recently stuck its finger in the dike. In “Last City Zero,” the opening poem from Cancer as a Social Activity: Affirmations of World’s End, Michael D. Williams, the volatile frontman for NOLA sludge pioneers Eyehategod, asks, “If New Orleans is the Big Easy, why is life so fucking hard?” The murky memoir was published in May of 2005, just months before Hurricane Katrina.

The natural disaster changed Williams’ definition of Southern discomfort, setting in motion a complicated string of events that ultimately forced him to abandon his home, which later burned down, and led to a 91-day stint at the Morgan City Jail, where he underwent a painful detoxification process. After making bail and being released on probation, things appeared to be looking up. Eyehategod had recently released Preaching the 'End-Time' Message, a collection of demos, live tracks, and singles that spanned the group’s career. In March, 35 bands, including Unearthly Trance, Kylesa, Minsk, and Mouth of the Architect, paid their respects with For the Sick: A Tribute to Eyehategod. Then, mere days before the band’s highly anticipated performance at May's Chaos in Tejas Festival at Emo’s, Williams was thrown into the Orleans Parish Prison (known to locals as “OPP”) due to previous parole violations. One week after his release, through the aide of MySpace and Kitten, the self-proclaimed “she-beast of Mr.

Williams,” Into the Void spoke with Williams, who finally set the record straight on his recent string of unfortunate events. 20, 2007, 455.