The Magnetar, nature’s ultimate superweapon | Hacker News Reader

The Magnetar, nature’s ultimate superweapon

arstechnica.com

179 pointshexo83 comments

Space sounds like Outback Australia, most of it's empty but the few things there are will just kill you.

Doesn't sound very hospitable.

I like that analogy. Because if you bring a well-stocked caravan, tools and spare parts, a radio, and a bit of know-how, you'll probably actually be fine.

Living "out there" for an extended period would be extremely difficult, but given what else sufficiently motivated humans have figured out, I think not the impossibility that many people imagine.

I think not really and outback Australia in my mind is not bad - you have to struggle some but you still might survive. Snakes, dingoes will be mostly afraid of people if you put up a fire in the night wild creatures will leave you be. There is heat during the day that does not care and can burn you badly, but if you stay in shade and take enough water it might be still quite ok.

But space in my mind is H. P. Lovecraft horror - it is empty but there are these unknown unknowns that don't care about what you are - they will just kill you without even noticing you were alive. Micro meteors, Van Allen radiation belts, random radiation like cosmic rays without atmosphere protection, exposure to the sun without atmosphere protection. It is not just some equipment, people can stay at ISS because there is loads of tech deployed to keep them safe.

Yeah, sounds easy enough, but people keep dying in the Outback when they get lost or their vehicle breaks down or gets stuck.

Bit like Death Valley I suppose.

I like how all these descriptions of how the Australian outback is not that bad have all these might survives, and might be still quite ok in them.

It is not bad compared to space :)

If I would compare outback Australia hike to walk in a park - yes outback Australia is hell hole where one has high chance to die.

If walk in your local park would be 10^0 then Australia hike would be 10^3 worse, what I argue space is at least 10^10.

You might survive. I would be a protein source for snakes on the first afternoon.

What does your theory have to say about that!?

Oh. Oh I see.

Ever tried to go to space?

You know like you die in 1 second when you make a wrong move ;)

I am not pointing out absolutes - just that comparison with going to space is totally out of order.

> space in my mind is H. P. Lovecraft horror

We didn't evolve to live in it. The scales, in space and time, are incomprehensibly large. It's not that it's out to kill us - we simply don't matter at cosmological scales. We are just the moss that gathers around rocks that stay undisturbed for long enough.

It's not that we can't learn to live in it, far from planetary surfaces, protective atmospheres, and mildly hot suns. We can, but the universe doesn't owe us anything and will never cooperate.

That for me explains the Fermi Paradox. Yes there a gazillion of stars and planets out there, but there’s also a lot of things that could go pop and sterilize everything tens or even hundreds of light years away.

That's not by itself sufficient to explain the Fermi paradox. You can go into the math, and you can find people online who have. I don't have time to dig that up for you now though.

There is no math. It's all assumptions. Which can be wrong for a variety of reasons.

Neither does living in Scandinavia but technology can conquer a lot.

Turns out, the Australian Outback is a great place to observe deadly magnetars:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASKAP

I read deadly maneaters and didn’t even see the typo because wilderness gonna wilderness.

I reading the article I think the ships from The Expanse were aptly named

I sometimes wonder how far is Musk from naming something Voice of the Whirlwind.

Why would he be very far from that? Also, I haven't read the book but from the synapsis it doesn't seem particularly disruptive.

He already has ships named Of Course I Still Love You, Just Read the Instructions, A Shortfall of Gravitas. If anything, I'd expect him to name a ship No More Mr Nice Guy or Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints, or for that matter, the Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath

Musk has his moments, but I don't think he's building spaceships kitted out for war just yet.

Well, now - that probably depends on what you think War is.

War on a scale that deserves a ship name from the Culture is as yet out of reach for humanity. Didn't the "Mistake Not ..." (or one of its siblings) slice a star in half at one point? There's also a point in Excession where one of the Minds notes that a point blank supernova is not really problematic for ships of its class.

Musk was re using ships from Iain Banks’ Culture series where ships are sentient.

Voice Of The Whirlwind is from The Expanse series, where a human colony finds ancient aliens tech and builds a class of warship called the Magnetar-class shops. They use an intense magnetic weapon to literally dissociate an Earth station as a show of force.

I've read one book in that series, "Surface Detail", and really enjoyed it. I tried reading the first one in the series and got bored... any others in the series you can strongly recommend? Player of Games maybe?

My opinion: The Player of Games was kind of lousy. It sounds like you haven't read Consider Phlebas, which is the first book in the series (at least according to Audible). That was pretty good.

I'll give consider phlebas another shot. Thanks.

Depends on what you like. I remember Consider Phlebas as a series of vignettes, while Player of Games is a coherent story. I like the coherent stories and also think Excession is quite good.

Yes , consider Phlebas is more like a series of episodes with a connecting arc. The goals are stated at the beginning

You might try Use of Weapons. If nothing else, it might change your views on a certain class of furniture.

Excession is also really nice.

Banks is credited with good warship names, but it was Eoin Colfer who came up with "Business End", which knocks them all into a cocked hat.

I think musk is much more likely to name something the full name of the "mistake not..."

A lot of stuff can kill you wimpy 1000 km away. How would you even get so close to a magnetar?

Supernova may perhaps fry your planet a couple dozens light years away!

Strongest magnetars would rip apart all molecules even 150gigameters away.

True, but the point to me was that magnetic fields alone can pull your molecular structure apart, which is something I didn't know. Not so much the distance, more magnets!

Light years are huge distances. One light-year is 63 thousand times larger than the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Even a mighty supernova would not fry you from a distance of a light-year or more.

Here's a quotation with the effects of a supernova by distance [1]

    An Earth like planet would be reduced to a cinder and thrown into interstellar space, even if it were thousands of times further from its star than Earth is from the Sun. Further out…

    At 2 to 5 light years: A bright blue point of light appears in the sky, growing to sun-like brightness over 14 to 30 days. Effects include increased surface temperatures, wildfires, extreme weather, melting of ice caps, lethal radiation levels, total ozone layer loss, and chemical changes to the atmosphere.

    At 20 to 50 light years: The blue light outshines a full moon a thousand times. Radiation levels cause cancers, sterility, birth defects, massive ozone layer loss ( 50% +) , high altitude nitrous oxide smog, increased cloud cover, loss of satellite networks, and lethal radiation dose to astronauts. Other possible effects include an worldwide lightning storms and dementia in humans and animals.

    At 100 to 250 light years: The blue light is comparable to full moon, and radiation causes a measurable spike in cancer and birth defect rates. Other effects include satellite disruption similar to the worst solar storms, increased frequency of lightning strikes, erratic behaviour and memory loss in mammals, and disruption to circadian rhythms.

    A world within 20 light years of the supernova may be engulfed in the expanding cloud of radioactive debris. This will cause more long term effects, including global cooling and an increase in background radiation levels.

[1] https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/572882/

"lethal radiation levels, total ozone layer loss, and chemical changes to the atmosphere" does sound like a fried planet for all practical purposes. So I was an order of magnitude off.

Love me some magnetars. Gonna nitpick here, a piece of the article claims that if you fell off a neutron star mountain 1-2cm tall, by the time you hit the ground you'd be traveling at half the speed of light. This appears to be false.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star#:~:text=The%20gra....

"If an object were to fall from a height of one meter on a neutron star 12 kilometers in radius, it would reach the ground at around 1400 kilometers per second".

Good to know... instead of being instantly obliterated into dust, I just get liquified.

Oh it's much worse than that. "However, even before impact, the tidal force would cause spaghettification, breaking any sort of an ordinary object into a stream of material."

`spaghettification'... mmmmmmm

I think the wikiped article is citing the velocity you’d have purely under the gravitational pull. That calculation likely doesn’t include the additional velocity given from the magnetic pull of magnetaurs. Given that magnetism is a stronger force, I don’t think the claim is disproven by the citation on Wikipedia.

That by itself would be extremely interesting, but the article text is:

“What happens inside a magnetar is a matter of pure speculation. Physicists think that the surface of a magnetar is covered in a shell of heavy atomic nuclei and free electrons. Because of the intense gravity [em. added], these surfaces are incredibly smooth; the highest "mountains" will only be a couple of centimeters tall. But don't think of them as trivial. If you were to fall off one of those mountains, by the time you reached the bottom, you would already be traveling at half the speed of light”

Such a paragraph doesn’t give me confidence they did the math including magnetism, especially considering the extraordinary claim it would imply… that the magnetic field would have multiple orders of magnitude more strength than gravity. I think it doesn’t pass the sniff test, such immense downward force would instantly turn the neutron star into a black hole.

Paging Admiral Duarte....

So we definitely need to visit one of these and harness it to drive high energy physics experiments.

I would love to do a 6-month rotation at humanity's magnetar research outpost. Seems like a great setting for a movie or video game.

Since these things only last for a short amount of time (cosmically speaking), physicists of the future will be like today’s tornado chasers, planning thousands of years in advance in order to park their detectors at just the right spot for a chance to wind their windows down, stick their heads out, and get their hair Einstein’d in the passing star death shockwaves.

I believe this was the premise of the star trek: tng episode "evolution" featuring Dr Kelso.

I saw an article a couple of weeks ago, possibly here, titled something like 'please don't build another large hadron collider'. It made me wonder if we could build a trap of sorts (like a large magnetic funnel, almost certainly in space) to direct exogenous (?) energetic particles to a target rather than accelerating them ourselves. Clearly nature can put more mustard on them than we can.

My guess is the challenge would be the relatively low counts, but maybe with a large enough trap that wouldn't be a problem.

We've spotted such particles. Like this one for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle

But how would we harness them? They travel almost to the speed of light and we have no indication where they will pop. And even if we knew the general direction, we're talking about something infinitesimal small. You'd need to have some really big obstacle that could be mobile. LHC's magnets are like five storey buildings.

That’s the one that came to mind.

No idea, sounds like a problem for engineering. :)

"They have the strongest magnetic fields ever observed, so strong they can melt you—literally dissociate you down to the atomic level—from a thousand kilometers away."

So horrifying and yet I love the author's enthusiasm.

The author definitely makes that sound impressive, but I don't think humans know how to approach within 1000km of any star without dying.

Yes. Ability to sterilize the whole solar system from 500 light years away is scarier.

Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!

Also the name of a credit hedge fund during the GFC. I wonder if they are still around

They sure are: https://www.magnetar.com/

It was famously suggested that they caused the 2008 market crash: https://www.propublica.org/article/all-the-magnetar-trade-ho...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar_Capital

Yeah they are pretty legendary. Frankly, I think it is pretty unlikely that they would have selected CDO components but it is certainly firmly in the realm of possibility.

Separately, I just checked their careers page and no software engineering positions. Seems like there would be a lot of automation and systems work to do there, but I guess it is possible that they just aren't hiring for those roles right now.

Ability to sterilize a planetary system from 500 light years away from just a readjustment.

Really, the sooner we can get clear of the galaxy, the safer we will be.

I presume these exist in every galaxy. Unless you’re suggesting we live in ships in the space between galaxies.

At least while we disassemble the various stellar objects and turn them into the computational substrate that powers our virtual reality paradise.

Disassembled planets should be enough for anybody.

There are plenty of stars well distant from most everything else.

But yes, by the time we are equipped to leave the galaxy we ought to be finished with living on planets. (Which have been known to have their own problems... Cf. Deccan Traps, Yellowstone Supervolcano, Siberian Traps.)

That’s why in The Culture sensible people live on orbitals.

Weird that they always seem to keep them in orbit around stars. Seems like prosecuting the Idiran War would have been impossible for the Idirans if they could not find the orbitals.

They probably can’t produce enough AM to power them autonomously, so still rely on stellar radiation. More importantly, it’s kind of fun to have a large star in the sky.

Any Mind that couldn't cobble up a perfect sun simulation invisible to the Idirans would be a disgrace.

I have a feeling we'll find that outside of galaxies are even bigger, stranger, more impossible horrors that our galaxy was protecting us from.

Maybe, others who left first.

But space is big. [citation needed]

The collision between Andromeda and Milky Way will be very disruptive, to say the least.

Not for most individual planets, excepting those that have a supermassive black hole come by. Odds favor you there.

Remember: most advanced technological civilisation collapses occur in their home galaxies.

Move to be safe!

>And here's the best part: They have the strongest magnetic fields ever observed, so strong they can melt you—literally dissociate you down to the atomic level—from a thousand kilometers away.

Why should they destroy a human or anything that does not have an magnetic field or it's made from iron?

From the article:

>The problem is that atoms are made of positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons. In weak magnetic fields, this doesn't make a bit of difference. But in strong fields, the electrons and protons respond differently. Atoms lose their traditional shape, and the electron orbitals become elongated along the direction of the magnetic field lines.

> ... your individual atoms would only be 1 percent as wide as they are long. With atoms turning into needles, atomic physics as we know it breaks down. As does all the bonds that atoms use to glue themselves together into complex molecules.

>In other words, the static magnetic field of a magnetar is strong enough to simply... dissociate you. All the molecules that you're made of simply come apart into oddly shaped atoms.

Subject was "[...] turned to steel in the great magnetic field" [1]

[1] Iommi T., Osbourne O., Butler G., Ward B. (1970). A Ferrous Human Journal of Paranoia, t. 4.

OK, that was hilarious. Thanks for making my day better.

If nothing else, everything is diamagnetic if the field is strong enough. The effect is usually just too weak to worry about.

Though I don't think this is exactly why, might be related.

Because magnetic fields interact with electrically charged, or electrically conductive things too. Strong enough magnetic fields will induce eddy currents in your brain and make you taste metal (don't have a reference handy; this is a known symptom of certain high-field MRI's and there's probably an HN thread about it). Turn up the field a few orders of magnitude, and the Ohmic heating from induced currents will vaporize you.

Magnetars are so far beyond merely "vaporized", there's no adequate language for "deforms and tears apart the electron orbitals of your constituent atoms"; I guess "melt" is close enough for pop science! Basically, you're no longer "matter" in the conventional sense of the word -- you're no longer made of (recognizable) atoms.

How far would vaporisation-by-magnetar differ from spaghettification-by-black-hole? They sound very similar.

Spaghettification is about gravitational tidal forces pulling all your molecules away from each other.

Magnetar vaporization is about the electromagnetic force (which is much stronger than gravity) tearing your molecules themselves apart. (Although the gravitational tidal forces around a magnetar would also be unpleasant.)

Magnetar vaporization would not be painful: Pain requires nerves, and your nerves would be gone. It also requires a brain to receive the nerve impulses and that would be gone too.

Spaghettification could be painful especially around a medium-sized black hole because it would happen slowly enough that you could feel your body being torn apart. Around a small black hole it would happen so fast that it would be essentially painless. Around a super-large black hole like the one at the center of our galaxy the tidal forces might be so gentle you'd never be spaghettified at all.

Because of electrons, they are moving charge wich does interact with magnetic field. At this strong levels, it's quickly detrimental for molecules.

Atoms are made of charged particles, so a strong enough magnetic field will act on these. Most magnetic fields are a total joke and can only act on highly charged particles but strong enough? The electrons in your tissue can get pulled away from their nuclei.

Your entire experience of reality is almost exclusively electromagnetic.

Here's a frog floating in a magnetic field

https://youtu.be/KlJsVqc0ywM?t=31

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