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posted by takyon on Friday July 31 2015, @02:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-a-star dept.

The object in question, which goes by the catchy name LSR J1835 + 3259, is awkwardly on the boundary between a small star and a brown dwarf (an object with insufficient mass to set off hydrogen fusion). Like many other objects of this size, it rotates rapidly, completing one go-around in just under three hours.

Each time around, LSR J1835 sent a burst of radio emissions Earth's way. This suggests that there's a single source of radio emissions that is rotating with the object. The authors of the new paper added visible observations, which detected hydrogen emissions that also showed this pulsed pattern. There were also indications of the presence of negatively charged hydrogen ions (hydrogen carrying an extra electron).

All of these observations, the authors argue, can be explained by a single phenomenon: a beam of electrons striking the atmosphere of LSR J1835, setting off an aurora. Based on their various measurements, the authors estimate that the magnetic field strength in the region is at least 1,500 Gauss, and could be double that (for comparison, the Earth's magnetic field is about half a Gauss). They also estimate that the electron beam carries over 1017 Watts of power.

LSR J1835+3259 was first measured in 2001-02 and is about 18.48 light years away from Earth.


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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday July 31 2015, @03:44AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 31 2015, @03:44AM (#216148) Journal

    (Who the hell is shooting electrons to a brown dwarf?)

    What could cause an electron beam of 10¹⁷ watts?

    To put it in perspective: the energy consumed by the entire world civilization in 2014 was 155,505 TWh [wikipedia.org] = (1.5505 * 10¹⁷ Wh). Assuming that electron beam is continuous, it carries every second 2000-3000 time more energy than the humans managed to consume during the whole 2014 year.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday July 31 2015, @04:19AM

      by mhajicek (51) on Friday July 31 2015, @04:19AM (#216163)

      I wouldn't be so surprised if it had been a red dwarf. Some pretty crazy stuff has been known to happen there.

      --
      The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @02:25PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @02:25PM (#216316)
      On that Wikipedia page, someone calculated that 1.5505 * 10¹⁷ Wh is the same as 5.598 × 1020 J (or watt-seconds). A 10¹⁷ W beam would have to shine for around 100 minutes to transfer as much energy as we use in a year.
  • (Score: 2) by nukkel on Friday July 31 2015, @05:11AM

    by nukkel (168) on Friday July 31 2015, @05:11AM (#216170)

    In SI units, that's 0.15T.

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday July 31 2015, @05:43AM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 31 2015, @05:43AM (#216176) Journal

      In SI units, that's 0.15T.

      Cheap. Around $15k tops - affordable on most CC-es.
      (grin)

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford