Why was Earth bombarded with high-energy particles in 774?

[Sabre]

ArsTech

The one thing everyone can agree on is that something strange happened in the year 774, and that whatever it was sent a burst of high-energy particles into the Earth's atmosphere. Exactly what that event was, however, has remained the subject of contention. And it's back in the news today, with a new study pointing the finger at a rare event called a short gamma-ray burst.

The reason for the part that people agree on is an unusually large spike in the amount of radioactive carbon found in tree rings that have been dated back to 774. That apparently is correlated with the timing of a surge in a specific isotope of beryllium, detected in ice cores of Antarctica. Both of these isotopes are the product of collisions that take place in our atmosphere, produced by energetic particles striking some of the gasses normally resident there.

The obvious candidate, and the one that got everyone excited, was a nearby supernova. Unfortunately, supernovae that are close enough tend to be rather obvious. With a single exception (a mention of a "red crucifix" in the skies over Britain), nobody seems to have noticed anything unusual. Even more problematic, most supernovae leave a remnant, composed of a hot, expanding cloud of material, with either a neutron star or black hole at its center. We've now done whole-sky surveys in the X-ray part of the spectrum, and we've not seen a remnant at the right age and distance.

That's where things stood late last year, when a group of scientists caught a basic logical flaw in the initial research. The original description of the isotope anomaly ruled out the Sun because it doesn't have big enough eruptions of energetic particles. But the calculations assumed the eruption would have been spread evenly in all directions; the Sun's eruptions are actually directional, so the total energy involved in the event is much smaller.

New calculations brought the total energy down to about 20 times the size of the largest event in recorded human history. Although we've never seen the Sun do anything on that scale, we have seen eruptions like that on other Sun-like stars in our galaxy.

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Pretty interesting stuff. LOL, lets hope it doesn't happen any time soon again...

[ElZorro]

I wonder how many satellites that'd cook. All of them? Most? Just the ones built by the lowest bidder?

[Sabre]

lol, probably all. The ones made to be near the Sun might have a chance.

[Mr Kleen]

My guess is all the ones on that side for sure.