

Eta Carinae - luk3thomas
http://laserstars.org/news/EtaCarinae.html

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CanSpice
This is essentially a copy of the original press release from 1996:
[http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1996/06/](http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1996/06/)

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unwind
Of course, one of the researchers is named "Ray".

I love
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism).
:)

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Florin_Andrei
The idea of a spontaneous laser sounds surprising, but perhaps it shouldn't
be. Some laser media have so much gain per distance, you get lasing without
any optics - just pump energy into the system and it starts flashing.

Nitrogen lasers are like that. If you have a high voltage power supply, you
could make a nitrogen laser in an afternoon, and no optics are required at
all. Bonus: not even a container is required, since it can lase at room
temperature and pressure, even when mixed with oxygen.

~~~
wiml
IIRC, both Mars and Venus have enough of a natural population inversion in
their upper atmospheres for laser action to take place (NIR CO2 lasers).
Googling this hits paywalls pretty quickly but it seems to have been
investigated in the 1980s.

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andrewflnr
Besides the obvious possibilities (and implausibilities) of using something
like this as an interstellar weapon, I wonder just how hard it would be to use
a laser star to transmit general purpose power to, say, your home system, as a
way of edging towards Kardashev 3, a really scaled up version of beaming power
to earth from orbiting solar cells. Does such a concept work at all, in terms
of real numbers, for a sufficiently patient society?

