Absurd Intellectual

Reading about the magnetar burst that blinded satellites five years ago left me agape. Some facts, gleaned from this blog post at Discover Magazine:

If you crushed every car in the United States into the size of a sugar cube, that’s the density of this magnetar. Except the magnetar is 20 kilometres wide. That gives it a gravity that’s maybe 100 billions times as strong as Earth. And a magnetic field that may be a quadrillion times as strong.

So what happens when the surface cracks? In a ‘star quake’? Well, such a quake might have a Richter value of 32 — and remember, a Richter earthquake that’s 9 (like the one that caused the Indian Ocean tsunami, also five years ago) would be 10 times as powerful as Richer 8. A Richter 10 quake would be 100 times as powerful as a Richter 8. A Richter 11 would be a thousand times as powerful as a Richter 8. And so on. And this is a Richter 32.

The quake released a blast of energy — so much that in a fifth of a second, the magnetar released as much energy as our sun does in a quarter-million years.

It was 50,000 light years away, thank goodness. Which is really freaking far. But on some satellites, the resulting wave of photons completely washed-out their detectors — even through the photons had to travel through the satellite itself.

I can’t do it justice — and even the Discover blogger seems to struggle for superlatives to describe it — but let’s just say I’ve awed by how insignificant we are.