Predictability and length of gamma ray bursts (for sci-fi)

[ntc69]

I'm a short story author and got some useful help on here a few months back...and now I'm back with another idea!

I want some phenomenon that would mean the entire surface of the Earth become uninhabitable for X months or X years...everyone has to be down in deep bunkers.

I thought the obvious candidate was gamma ray bursts but there seem to be two problems:

1. they don't last very long, so wouldn't half of the earth always be largely unaffected
2. they're not predictable, so a lot of my plot (governments trying to organise themselves, get selected people down into shelters) wouldn't be accurate

is there anything else I could use? I would prefer to avoid the ol' asteroid as it's been done a million times. Supernova? Intense sunspot/flares activity? (again, is that predictable?)

it seems asteroids/comets are the best events but I'd love to do something with GRB's.

 

[origin]

I'm a short story author and got some useful help on here a few months back...and now I'm back with another idea!

I want some phenomenon that would mean the entire surface of the Earth become uninhabitable for X months or X years...everyone has to be down in deep bunkers.

I thought the obvious candidate was gamma ray bursts but there seem to be two problems:

1. they don't last very long, so wouldn't half of the earth always be largely unaffected
2. they're not predictable, so a lot of my plot (governments trying to organise themselves, get selected people down into shelters) wouldn't be accurate

is there anything else I could use? I would prefer to avoid the ol' asteroid as it's been done a million times. Supernova? Intense sunspot/flares activity? (again, is that predictable?)

it seems asteroids/comets are the best events but I'd love to do something with GRB's.

Why not use a GRB and incorporate into the story a dashing young physicist named Blaze Hotbody has discovered how to predict GRB by nuetrino emmissons of a certain color or something?

 

[MeteorWayne]

Off to SciFi with this, as the OP suggested...

 

[ntc69]

I'm a short story author and got some useful help on here a few months back...and now I'm back with another idea!

I want some phenomenon that would mean the entire surface of the Earth become uninhabitable for X months or X years...everyone has to be down in deep bunkers.

I thought the obvious candidate was gamma ray bursts but there seem to be two problems:

1. they don't last very long, so wouldn't half of the earth always be largely unaffected
2. they're not predictable, so a lot of my plot (governments trying to organise themselves, get selected people down into shelters) wouldn't be accurate

is there anything else I could use? I would prefer to avoid the ol' asteroid as it's been done a million times. Supernova? Intense sunspot/flares activity? (again, is that predictable?)

it seems asteroids/comets are the best events but I'd love to do something with GRB's.

Why not use a GRB and incorporate into the story a dashing young physicist named Blaze Hotbody has discovered how to predict GRB by nuetrino emmissons of a certain color or something?

is the direction of GRB's also predictable in any way. If this hotshot scientist found a way of predicting them to some extent, why would he be so certain that a star at, say, 100 light years, was going to direct its GRB at earth? Do they always come out of the poles of the star or something like that or is it random...or do we not yet understand?

 

[billslugg]

Gamma Ray Bursts originate in very old, very far away galaxies. Much too far for us to be able to resolve the precursor. A better idea might be to use a nearby star about to go supernova. Betelgeuse is an example. We can tell that it is in the latter stage of its life and can estimate that it might go sometime in the next few tens of thousands of years. That is about as close as anyone can predict. The reason lies in the trigger for a supernova. A Type II core collapse supernova is the more common one.

Stars fuse light elements (lighter than iron) together causing the release of heat. Iron cannot be fused with anything except by the addition of energy so it stands as the last element forged in a star prior to its collapse. The iron accumulates at the center of the star. As the lighter elements are used up, the heat that is released by fusion is insufficient to keep the star bloated. As it shrinks, the gravitational force at its surface increases. Thus the pressure inside the star increases. At some point, completely unpredictable to us, the pressure at the center of the star exceeds the force that keeps the protons in the nucleus separate from the electrons orbiting it. The protons and the electrons combine to form neutrons thus taking up less space. A domino effect occurs and the star collapses on itself in a few tenths of a second, bounces against the core and a shock wave speeds outward blowing the surface layers outward. If the star is spinning rapidly, which it most certainly is, then it is surrounded by closely packed lines of magnetic force parallel to its equator. Charged particles have difficulty crossing lines of force, thus the favored exit for matter is at each pole.

If we, on Earth, were looking at the star, we could tell by spectroscopy that the various lines were not split, thus they were not advancing toward us nor receeding. This would tell us that we were looking directly at one of the poles. This is aking to sighting down the barrel of a gun and must be a neccessary part of any novel.

Your hero must be able to devise a method for telling when the star was going to collapse. He would have to know the mass of the star and the exact mix of elements within it. Perhaps he could have a sister star of identical composition that went supernova near the beginning of the novel, and then find that the sister star was exhibiting a trend toward an identical mix of elements.

Being in the impingement zone of charged particles from a supernova would strip the upper atmosphere off the Earth, distort the magnetic field, destroy the ozone, irradiate the surface of the planet, cover us with brown smog and erase our thumb drives. It would be like a nuclear winter only much worse. It depends how bad you want it to be. You could melt the surface if you wanted to.

 

[ntc69]

thanks bill, that's very useful. I think I'll go the supernova direction.

One part of your post I didn't really get was this:

we could tell by spectroscopy that the various lines were not split, thus they were not advancing toward us nor receeding. This would tell us that we were looking directly at one of the poles.

what do you mean here by "lines"? How do we tell if we looking at the pole of a star?

Reading your description, it sounds a lot like something I read about GRB. What's the intrinsic difference?

thanks again.

 

[origin]

Gamma Ray Bursts originate in very old, very far away galaxies. Much too far for us to be able to resolve the precursor.

you are implying that the gamma ray burst only happened in the past very long ago. The other way to look at this is that they are very rare and we therefore need a large population of galaxies to see a GRB. It very well may be that it is possible to have a GRB in the milkyway - and it would in that case be a very bad thing if it was 'aimed' at us.