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?
I did a little snooping and found someone claiming to have a source on the diameter of a jet, but their link went nowhere. I think it’s this though. Anyway, at 0.05 light years across and presumed circular, a human body purposefully over estimated to have a cross sectional area of 2m^2, would be subject to 28.5 gigawatts.
Wolfram Alpha very kindly points out that this is the equivalent of nearly two and a half space shuttles blasting you, boosters and all. Good luck!
I’ve no idea how accurate this is, but googling gave me an estimate of the energy required that suggests it would take a little less than three seconds to vaporize an entire body. If it can create a plasma, that counts as subatomic in my books, but I’ve no idea what that would take.
Nuclear would depend more on the particle kinematics and I’ve got no intuition there tbh. I’m sure it’s certainly possible though, especially if you get close.
I’m as fascinated by those shuttle comparisons as anything else!
On the face of it, I wouldn’t have guessed that the space shuttle’s power output was measured in gigawatts, nor that the space shuttle’s output is on the same scale as an entire country’s steam power output (in 1896, sure… but still!)
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 (distant) ones right now, just by random chance.