Starquakes: The Universe’s Way of Telling You That It Hates You

ODDITY examines strange and esoteric phenomena and events from the remote, uncanny corners of technology, science and history.

For a few seconds yesterday the Eastern seaboard was awkwardly reminded of what little control humans exert over anything. Buildings shook. Windows rattled. A few plastic cups maybe toppled over. Something like two-dozen poor souls probably stood stock-still, thinking, egads, I’m flashing back, until the hoards came spilling out into the streets, giggling in one collective “holy shit!” and putting in enough calls and texts and tweets to temporarily clog cell services. It was a human moment.

Yet it was all pretty pathetic, and only partly because of the overreaction (I’m guilty) to what’s considered seismically routine in other parts of the country and planet. It was a joke, if anything, because earthquakes can’t hold candles to STARQUAKES.

The cosmic analogues of our petty trembles shake out when neutron star crusts suddenly shift. A neutron star is the dense, screaming-hot dregs of a massive star after gravitationally collapsing via various types of supernovae. And when that star’s powerful internal magnetic fields undulate, extreme stresses shoot across its surface. It’s believed these things pulse out the punishing gamma ray flares produced about once a decade by soft gamma repeaters, objects – magnetars (super-magnetic, super-compact stellar corpses) and neutron stars, say – that irregularly emit large claps of gamma- and X-rays.

Maybe you remember SGR 1806-20, the largest and brightest starquake explosion in recorded history. In late 2004 this fast-spinning magnetar, 20-km wide and 50,000 light-years away, shook so violently that by one calculation it released the equivalent of 10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts of gamma ray fury. To give you some idea of the ferocity behind that sort of energy belch, during last month’s heat wave all New York consumed a measly terawatt, or one trillion watts, of power. But here, in one 10th of a second, a small star core situated in the constellation Sagittarius emitted more energy than the Sun does every 100,000 years. “We figure that it’s probably the biggest explosion observed by humans within our galaxy since Johannes Kepler saw his supernova in 1604,” as Dr. Rob Fender, of Southampton University, UK, told the BBC.com. The radiation flash was so great that it ricocheted off the Moon, lightning up our atmosphere. Had SGR 1806-20 been within 10 light-years of us and our cute ‘lil seisms its convulsion likely would’ve triggered an abrupt mass extinction.

Previously on Oddity: The Danger Triangle of the Face

Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv.