
White Dwarf Lashes Red Dwarf with Mystery Ray - friederbluemle
http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1627/
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KingMob
"These high energy particles release blasts of radiation that lash the
companion red dwarf star."

It would be really cool if we were witnessing an ancient battle between Type
II Kardashev civilizations.

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hinkley
More like a kid flicking the light switch off and on again.

Damnit, Billy, stop messing around with the light switch! You'll burn out the
bulbs.

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ehsanu1
Billy, it's not nice to vaporize planets! Now you go over there right now and
apologize to those nice galaxy overlords!

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Aelinsaar
It really makes you appreciate the power of a beam of relativistic electrons,
when you consider that it's managing to cause a star to basically flicker.

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the8472
it's not just a matter of velocity but also of flux. you couldn't use the LHC
to make a star flicker. It's just enough to melt a car.

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Natsu
Exactly how ridiculous would it be to create the flux needed to use this to
modulate our star? Or what about some _other_ star? Could it be used as a
means of communication? Sure, other means are _easier_ but this would be
visible even to a very low tech civilization and people who had nothing better
to do used to watch the stars a lot.

I'm guessing we're several orders of magnitude away from the kind of flux that
could do that sort of thing, but I have to wonder...

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Aelinsaar
I mean, it would probably help to have a white dwarf that you could two around
and manipulate somehow.

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parshimers
Raise your hand if you thought this was a post about a new Dwarf Fortress
patch....

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idlewords
Why can't we just get along?

