The Death Star

A letter to son from proud dad

Hey son
Recent possessor of Bachelor in Science of Physics sheep skin

I watched a program on the science channel called ‘The Death Star’. It was about gamma rays, supposedly the deadliest energy in the universe. Deadliest to what I am not sure. Of course that would include all life forms, which the program was not necessarily alluding to, because the show was all about the ‘big’ stuff. Like solar systems, galaxies, stars being ‘born’ (their words) in dust clouds a gazillion light years across, black holes and giant black holes. So I don’t know if they included gamma rays disrupting or destroying other celestial bodies in the definition of being the deadliest energy or not.

What they did observe were gamma rays hitting the earth very frequently. That’s frequent for us, not frequent in terms of universal history. Gamma rays are not light and can’t be used to figure their distance from earth by using red shift spectrum light. So red shift measurements were calculated using dust clouds passed through by the gamma rays. Up to this point the scientists thought the observed gamma rays were all coming from the Milky Way. Then the results of the red shift came in and all were astounded, it is all red. No blue, green, or yellow; never had a phenomena this old had been detected. These gamma rays appeared to be hitting our planet just a billion or two light years short of the age of the universe, the big bang, that’s some fourteen billion light years ago. The scientists were sure they had made a mistake in their calculations somewhere.

A new test was devised. To look at the angle that the gamma rays that are hitting the earth to determine where in the night sky they are coming from. They thought the gamma rays should all be coming from the Milky Way plane. This would prove the red shift measurements were incorrect. That’s not what they found; gamma rays are hitting us from many sectors of space, all from the general direction of the big bang.

This was even more disturbing. The amount of energy necessary to have the gamma rays get to us from the distance they are brake Einstein’s basic law, E=MC2, the law that holds all modern physics together. The amount of energy it would take something, anything, to blow up and scatter gamma rays of that strength in all directions twelve or thirteen billion light years away would need more mass then was contained in the entire universe. Energy releases cannot exceed the energy stored in any mass, squared. There was a big problem, nobody breaks Einstein’s law.

One fellow figured it out. If the gamma rays where measured as a ‘beam’ instead of an explosion that shoots energy in all directions Einstein’s law works. A massive ‘Death Star’ could blow up; turn into a gigantic black hole and shoot gamma rays out from its center. Like a flash light beam aimed strait out from the center of a circle, in both directions.

Here is where the show ended, leaving me with a few questions. There are hundreds of these giant black holes gamma ray machines. Since we are only detecting the giant black holes that are aimed in our direction that would be a small percentage of the giant black hole population. Surely all the black holes are not pointed at us. Therefore there must be thousands if not millions of these things pointing in every direction.

Then they said the destructive power of one of these ray guns, if it were closer, would evaporate our planet. They did not say how much closer. But when they thought all the gamma rays were coming from within the Milky Way the rays would have been much weaker because we are not getting harmed by the gamma rays. I am curious to know what distance the death star black holes need to be before frying our planet and solar system in a fraction of a second. And I did not hear if some of our atmosphere is helping us ‘live’ critters from having our brains boiled by this deadliest form of energy in the universe. Perhaps global warming will weaken the ionosphere and the deadly rays will get through.

So, get back to me with the answers in a couple, three days.

Love
dad