White Dwarf Lashes Red Dwarf with Mystery Ray

eso.org

57 points·friederbluemle··9 comments

"These high energy particles release blasts of radiation that lash the companion red dwarf star."

It would be really cool if we were witnessing an ancient battle between Type II Kardashev civilizations.

More like a kid flicking the light switch off and on again.

Damnit, Billy, stop messing around with the light switch! You'll burn out the bulbs.

Billy, it's not nice to vaporize planets! Now you go over there right now and apologize to those nice galaxy overlords!

It really makes you appreciate the power of a beam of relativistic electrons, when you consider that it's managing to cause a star to basically flicker.

it's not just a matter of velocity but also of flux. you couldn't use the LHC to make a star flicker. It's just enough to melt a car.

Exactly how ridiculous would it be to create the flux needed to use this to modulate our star? Or what about some other star? Could it be used as a means of communication? Sure, other means are easier but this would be visible even to a very low tech civilization and people who had nothing better to do used to watch the stars a lot.

I'm guessing we're several orders of magnitude away from the kind of flux that could do that sort of thing, but I have to wonder...

I mean, it would probably help to have a white dwarf that you could two around and manipulate somehow.

Raise your hand if you thought this was a post about a new Dwarf Fortress patch....

Why can't we just get along?

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