Like, obviously they would die immediately. But I’m wondering, would they be ripped to subatomic shreds? Would they somehow manage to set off a small nuclear explosion? Would they just get cooked as they’re propelled into the void?
Like, obviously they would die immediately. But I’m wondering, would they be ripped to subatomic shreds? Would they somehow manage to set off a small nuclear explosion? Would they just get cooked as they’re propelled into the void?
Matter in the jets goes at like 0.25c, which some quick research tells me is absolutely enough to overwhelm the coulomb barrier and cause nuclear reactions.
Where is that image from? I was expecting a lot wider. (And it’s going to be speculation because we have limited resolution that far away)
No clue where the image is from, sorry.
Yeah, figured it would be something relativistic like that, I was just looking at overall power to do that back of the envelope calculation. Considering how high the energy is at ~0.25c, it makes me wonder what the average particle spacing is in the jet at that diameter.
I expect a lot wider too, the jets will diverge of course so it’s going to depend on how far away from the star you’re measuring. I just took 0.05lyr because it’s a size I had a very shitty source for hahaha.
Yeah, we’re pretty much short a variable here. If we had density, mass flux or (some rough measure of) diameter we could calculate the others, but we don’t. That might be because it’s actually unknown - they’re all really far away. In any case, I doubt it’s narrow and dense enough to really be very matter-like. It’s a particle beam.
Like I mentioned in my own reply, we’re actually in the beams of multiple ones already, just by random chance.