Chapter 4 3. Light Cannon and Death Star
4-3-2-1, fire!
The Death Star was a massive weapon, the size of an entire moon.The Death Star fired directly at the helpless planet of Alderaan, home of Princess Leia, burning it to ashes and causing it to burst apart in a devastating explosion, sending the planet's debris across the throughout the solar system. One billion innocent souls screamed in agony, interfering with the force induction of the entire galaxy.
But is it really possible for the Death Star weapon in the Star Wars epic to exist?Could such a weapon wield an entire bank of laser cannons to vaporize an entire planet?Could it be true that Luke Skywalker and Darth Wader have lightsabers made of light beams that can cut through reinforced steel?Could laser guns, like the light cannons in Star Trek, be the next generation of weapons for law enforcement and soldiers in the future?
In "Star Wars," millions of moviegoers raved about these ingenious, terrific special effects.But they were underwhelming to some critics, who lashed out at the special effects, declaring them highly entertaining, when they clearly couldn't be true.A moon-sized ray gun capable of shattering a planet is nonsense, as are swords made of frozen beams, even in a galaxy far, far away—they yelled repeatedly.Special effects guru George Lucas definitely overdid it this time.
Unbelievable though it may be, there is in fact no physical limit to the amount of raw energy that can be injected into a beam of light.The laws of physics that prevent a Death Star or a lightsaber from being created don't exist.In fact, beams of gamma rays capable of shattering a star exist in nature.A violent burst of rays from a distant gamma-ray burst from deep space created an explosion right after the Big Bang.
The dream of controlling and harnessing energy beams is not new, but is firmly rooted in ancient myths and legends.The Greek god Zeus is famous for unleashing lightning on mortals; the ancient Norse god Thor (Thor) has a magic hammer "Mjolnir" (Mjolnir) that can ignite lightning; and the Indian god Indra (Indra) ) is known for unleashing energy beams from a magical spear.
The concept of using rays as weapons probably started with the great ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes.He was perhaps the greatest scientist of all the ancients, discovering the original version of calculus two thousand years ago, before Newton and Leibniz.Archimedes helped defend Syracuse during an epic battle against the Roman general Marcellus in the Second Punic War in 214 BC kingdom.He is believed to have created giant solar reflectors that focused sunlight onto the sails of enemy ships, setting them on fire (even today there is debate among scientists as to whether this was an actual, effective beam weapon ; various groups of scientists have attempted to reproduce this feat, with varying results).
Laser guns appeared in science fiction in 1889 with Welles' classic War of the Worlds.In the book, aliens from Mars use their tripod-mounted weapons to fire beams of heat energy that wipe out entire cities.During World War II, the Nazis were eager to achieve the latest advances in technology with which to conquer the world.They experimented with different forms of laser guns, including a sonic device based on parabolic mirrors that could focus a powerful beam of sound.
Weapons made of focused beams of light entered the public imagination with the James Bond franchise Goldfinger, the first Hollywood film to give lasers a major role (when the legendary British spy was While strapped to a metal table, a powerful laser advances slowly, gradually melting the table between his legs and horribly slicing him in half).
Physicists initially scoffed at the much-hyped ray guns in Wells' novel because they violated the laws of optics.According to Maxwell's equations, the light we see around us dissipates quickly and is incoherent (in other words, it's a clutter of electromagnetic waves of varying frequencies and phases).Once, coherent, focused, uniform beams of light -- as we discover lasers present -- were thought to be impossible to create.
This all changed with the advent of quantum theory.At the turn of the 20th century, although Newton's laws and Maxwell's equations were extremely successful in explaining the motion of the planets and the way light behaved, they clearly failed to explain a whole class of phenomena.They unfortunately fail to explain why materials conduct electricity, why metals melt at certain temperatures, why gases emit light when heated, and why certain materials become superconductors at low temperatures—all of which require an understanding of the internal dynamics of atoms .The time is ripe for a revolution.The 250-year-old Newtonian physics will be overthrown, declaring that a new kind of physics is about to be born.
In 1900, in Germany, Max Plank proposed that energy is not continuous, as Newton believed, but occurs in small, distinct units called "quanta" ( quanta).Then, in 1905, Einstein postulated that light was made up of these tiny units, or quanta, which were later named "photons."With this powerful yet simple idea, Einstein was able to explain the photoelectric effect: why electrons are released when a beam of light is shone on a metal.Today, the photoelectric effect and photons form the basis of televisions, lasers, solar cells and a host of modern electronic devices. (Einstein's theory of the photon was so revolutionary that even Max Planck, always a loyal supporter of Einstein, could not believe it at first. About Einstein, Planck wrote : "He might miss the mark sometimes...say, with his light quantum hypothesis, which really can't be blamed on him.")
Then, in 1913, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr gave us a completely new map of the atom that looked like a miniature version of the solar system.But, unlike our solar system in space, electrons can only move in separate orbits or shells around the nucleus.When an electron "jumps" from one shell to a smaller, less energetic shell, it releases the energy of a photon.When an electron absorbs a photon of discrete energy, it "jumps" into a larger nucleus-shell with more energy.
A nearly complete theory of the atom emerges in 1925, along with quantum mechanics and the work of Erwin Schrodinger, Werner Heisenberg, and many other far-reaching research 's arrivalAccording to quantum theory, an electron is a particle, but has waves associated with it, giving it both particle and wave properties.Such waves obey an equation, called the Schrodinger wave equation, which allows us to deduce the properties of atoms, including all the "jumps" that Bohr postulated.
Before 1925 the atom was considered a mysterious entity, and many people, such as the philosopher Ernst Mach, felt that it might not exist at all. After 1925, we were able to observe the dynamics of atoms in real depth and to predict their properties with precision.Amazingly, this means that with a big enough computer, you can use the laws of quantum theory to derive the properties of chemical elements.Using the same method, Newtonian physicists could calculate the motion of all celestial bodies in the universe if they had a computing machine large enough.Quantum physicists have announced that they can theoretically calculate the properties of every chemical element in the universe.If someone has a big enough computer, he can also write the wave function of the whole human being.
In 1953, Professor Charles Townes of the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues produced a coherent ray in the form of microwaves, which was solemnly named Maser (Maser, microwave amplification through stimulated emission of radiation, which is the abbreviation of "High Efficiency Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission").He and Russian physicists Nikolay Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov eventually won the Nobel Prize in 1964.Soon, their research extended to visible light, leading to the birth of the laser (the phaser, however, is a fictional device made famous by Star Trek).
To generate laser light, one must start with a special medium capable of transmitting the laser beam, such as a special gas, crystal or bipolar vacuum tube.The medium is then flooded with energy from the outside world in the form of electricity, radio, light, or chemical reactions.This sudden influx of energy causes the atoms of the medium to expand, so that the electrons absorb the energy and jump into the outer electron shells.
In this excited, expansive state, the medium is unstable.If you then send a beam of light into this medium, the photons will collide with the atoms one by one, causing them to suddenly decay to a low-level state, releasing more photons in the process.This, in turn, triggers even more electrons to emit photons, eventually causing the atom to decay in a catastrophe, causing trillions and trillions of photons to suddenly be released into the beam.The point is that, for a given substance, when this "avalanche" of photons occurs, all photons are in resonance, that is, they are coherent.
(Think of it as a row of dominoes. The dominoes are in their lowest energy state when lying flat on a table. When standing upright they are in a high-energy, expanded state, similar to expanding atoms in a medium. If you Toppling a domino causes a sudden collapse of all these energies at once, as in a laser beam.)
Only certain materials "laser," specifically, when a photon strikes an expanding atom, it emits a photon that is coherent with the original photon.As a result of this coherence, all the photons in this flood of photons resonate, creating a pencil-thin laser beam (contrary to myth, laser beams don't stay pencil-thin forever. For example, a laser beam fired at the moon would gradually expand until it created a spot several miles in diameter).
A simple gas laser consists of a tube of helium and neon.When electricity passes through the tube, the atoms are given energy.Then, if the energy is suddenly released all at once, a coherent beam of light is created.The beam is enhanced with two mirrors, one draped over the other's head so that the light bounces between them.One mirror is completely opaque to light, but the other allows light to escape a small amount with each pass, creating a beam of light that exits one end of the mirror.
Today, lasers are used everywhere from grocery store checkout lines to the fiber optic cables that carry the Internet, from laser printers and CD players to modern computers.Lasers are also used in eye surgery, tattoo removal, and even in beauty salons. Lasers worth more than $5.4 billion were sold in 2004.
New lasers are being discovered almost every day, as new materials are discovered to emit laser light, and new ways are discovered to pump energy into media.
The question is, do some of these technologies work with ray guns or lightsabers?Is it possible to create a laser powerful enough to power a Death Star?A bewildering variety of lasers exists today, depending on the material emitting the laser light and the energy injected into the material (for example: intense beams, or even chemical explosions).Some of them are:
Since there are so many types of commercial lasers and military lasers are so powerful, why don't we have laser guns used in battle and on the battlefield?Laser guns of all kinds seem to be standard weapons in sci-fi movies, why don't we build them in the real world?
The answer is simple: the lack of a portable power unit.We need a tiny power plant with the power of a gigantic power station, but small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.Currently, the only way to control and utilize electricity on the scale of a large commercial power station is to build a large commercial power station.Right now, the smallest military device with enormous power is a tiny hydrogen bomb, which might kill you as well as your target.
There is also a secondary, auxiliary problem - the stability of the laser emitting material.Theoretically, there is no upper limit to the amount of energy we can focus on a laser beam.The problem is that the laser emitting material in a handheld laser gun will not be stable.Crystal lasers, for example, can overheat and crack if they are pumped with too much energy.So, to create a laser so powerful that it can vaporize a target or neutralize an attack, we might need to use the force of an explosion.In that case, the stability of the laser emitting material is not a limitation, since such a laser beam can only be used once.
Hand-held laser guns are not possible with today's technology due to issues with making portable power units and stabilizing laser emitting materials.Laser guns are possible, but only with a cable connecting them to a power source.Or, with nanotechnology, we might be able to create tiny batteries that store or generate enough energy to produce the energy of a violent explosion for a hand-held power device.Currently, as we have seen, nanotechnology is quite primitive.At the atomic level, scientists have built ingenious but impractical atomic devices, such as atomic abacus and atomic guitar.But it's conceivable that later in this century or the next, nanotechnology might give us tiny batteries capable of storing such enormous amounts of energy.
Lightsabers suffer from a similar problem.When the movie "Star Wars" first came out in the 1970s, and lightsabers became the best-selling children's toys, many critics pointed out that such a device would never be made.First, it is impossible to cure with light.Light always moves at the speed of light, and it cannot become solid.Second, it's impossible for a beam of light to terminate in midair like a lightsaber in Star Wars.The light keeps going forever, a true lightsaber with its beam extending into the sky.
In fact, there is a way to forge some form of lightsaber using plasma or superhot ionized gas.Plasma can be heated enough to glow in the dark and cut through steel.A plasma lightsaber consists of a thin, hollow rod that slides out of a handle, like a telescope.Hot plasma is released from the tube, which then seeps through small holes placed evenly along the pole.It creates a long tube of burning superheated gas, hot enough to melt steel.This device is sometimes called a plasma torch.
So, it's possible to make a high-energy, lightsaber-like device.But as with the ray gun, you're going to have to make a high-energy portable power unit that either needs a long cable connecting the lightsaber to the power supply, or has to use nanotechnology to make a tiny power supply that can deliver huge amounts of power.
So while some form of ray guns and lightsabers can be made today, the handheld weapons that appear in sci-fi movies are beyond current technology.However, with new advances in materials science and nanotechnology, it may be possible to develop some form of laser gun later in this century or the next, making it a first-rate wonder.
To make the Death Star laser cannons that can destroy entire planets and shake the galaxy like those described in Star Wars, we need to create the most powerful lasers ever created.Now, some of the most powerful lasers on Earth can emit temperatures that exist only in the centers of stars.They may one day harness the power of stars on Earth in the form of fusion reactors.
A fusion machine attempts to mimic what happens in space when a star first forms.A star begins as a gigantic ball of hydrogen gas of indeterminate shape until gravity compresses the gas, heating it to temperatures that eventually reach astronomical levels.Deep inside a star's core, for example, temperatures can surge to between 50 million and 100 million degrees Celsius, hot enough for hydrogen nuclei to slam into each other, creating helium nuclei and causing a sudden burst of energy.With the help of the fusion of hydrogen into helium, a small amount of clumps are transformed into the explosion energy of a star through Einstein's famous equation E=mc2, and become the energy source of the star.
There are two ways scientists are currently trying to manipulate fusion on Earth, and both have proven far more difficult to develop than expected.
The first way is called "inertial confinement".It uses the most powerful lasers on the planet to create a sliver of the sun in a laboratory.Neodymium glass solid-state lasers are ideal for mimicking the extreme temperatures found only in the cores of stars.These laser systems, the size of a large factory, consist of lasers that fire an array of parallel laser beams down a long tunnel. These high-energy laser beams then hit an array of small mirrors arranged around a spherical Meticulously uniform focus on a tiny, highly hydrogen-rich globule (made of materials such as lithium deuteride, the active ingredient in hydrogen bombs).The pellets are usually the size of a pinhead and weigh only 10 mg.
The blast of the laser burns away the surface of the pellet, causing the surface to vaporize and compress the pellet.When the ball is destroyed, a shock wave is generated that reaches the core of the ball, causing the temperature to suddenly reach millions of degrees, enough to fuse hydrogen nuclei into helium nuclei.The temperature and pressure are astronomical, and Lawson's criterion is satisfied, which is the criterion met in the inner cores of hydrogen bombs and stars (Lawson's criterion states that initiating fusion in a hydrogen bomb, in a star, or in a fusion instrument The reaction must be carried out to a detailed range of temperatures, densities, and confinement times).
During inertial confinement, enormous amounts of energy are released, including neutrons (lithium deuteride can reach a temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius and is 20 times denser than lead).A burst of neutrons emanates from the pellet.Neutrons strike the spherical felt material surrounding the container, and the felt is heated.The heated felt pads then boil the water, and the resulting steam is used to power a turbine and generate electricity.
However, uniformly focusing such high-intensity energy on a tiny sphere is problematic.The first serious attempt to create laser fusion was the Shiva laser, a 20-channel laser built at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California and which began operating in 1978. Beam Laser System (Shiva, the many-armed Indian Goddess, was modeled after this laser system design).The performance of the Shiva laser system was disappointing, but it was enough to demonstrate that laser fusion is technically feasible.The Shiva laser system was later replaced by the Nova laser system which was 10 times more powerful.But the Nova laser also failed to achieve the correct ignition of the pellets.However, it paved the way for research on what is now the National Ignition Facility (NIF), construction of which began at LLNL in 1997.
The NIF, which should be operational in 2009, is an astounding machine consisting of a set of 192 beams with an output of 700 trillion watts (equivalent to the energy output of about 700,000 nuclear power plants in a concentrated burst).It is a state-of-the-art laser system designed to achieve complete ignition of hydrogen-rich pellets. (Critics also point to its obvious military use, as its ability to mimic the detonation of a hydrogen bomb might enable a new type of nuclear weapon—the pure fusion bomb. A pure fusion bomb would require no uranium or plutonium The atomic bomb initiates the fusion program.)
But not even the NIF laser fusion machine, which has the most powerful lasers on Earth, can come close to the destructive power of the Death Star from Star Wars.To make such a device, we must be mindful of other sources of energy.
The second method scientists might use to power a dead star is called "magnetic confinement," a process in which a magnetic field confines a plasma of hot hydrogen gas.In fact, this approach could provide the blueprint for the first commercial fusion reactor.Currently, the most advanced fusion project of this type is the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). In 2006, a coalition of countries (including the European Union, the United States, China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and India) decided to build ITER in Cadarache, in the south of France.Aiming to heat hydrogen to 100 million degrees Celsius, it will become the first fusion reactor in history to produce more energy than it consumes.It aims to generate 500 million watts for 500 seconds (the current record is 16 million watts for 1 second). ITER plans to generate its first plasma in 2016 and be fully operational by 2022.At $12 billion, it was the third most expensive science project in history (behind the Manhattan Project and the International Space Station).
ITER looks like a giant ring, with hydrogen flowing through giant coils around the surface, the coils are cooled until they become superconductors, and huge amounts of electricity are pumped into it, creating a magnetic field that traps the ring. plasma in matter.When an electric current is injected into the ring, the gas is heated to extremely high temperatures.
The reason scientists are so excited about ITER is because they see the prospect of creating a cheap energy source.The fuel required for fusion reactors is ordinary sea water, which is rich in hydrogen.Fusion may, at least in theory, provide us with an inexhaustible source of cheap energy.
So why don't we use fusion reactors now?Why did it take decades to make progress after the fusion reaction was formulated in the 1950s?The problem is that there is enormous difficulty in compressing hydrogen fuel uniformly.In a star, gravity compresses the hydrogen gas into a perfect sphere so that the gas is evenly and completely heated.
In NIF's laser fusion, the concentric laser beam incinerating the surface of the sphere must be absolutely uniform, and achieving this uniformity is extremely difficult.In a magnetic confinement machine, the magnetic field has both north and south poles, and as a result, it is not easy to compress the gas uniformly into a sphere.The best we can do is create a toroidal magnetic field.But compressing gas is like squeezing a balloon: every time you squeeze the balloon from one end, the air inflates some other part.Squeezing the balloon evenly from all angles at the same time was a daunting challenge.The hot gas usually leaks from the magnetic bottle and eventually hits the reactor wall, interrupting the fusion reaction.This is why it is so difficult to compress hydrogen uniformly for more than 1 second.
Unlike fission plants of this generation, fusion reactors do not produce large amounts of nuclear waste (a conventional fission plant produces 30 tons of extremely high waste per year. Instead, the waste produced by fusion reactors is mainly the radioactive residue left over after the reactor is eventually scrapped steel).
Fusion cannot solve the planet's energy crisis anytime soon.Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, French Nobel laureate in physics, has said: "We say we will put the sun in a box. It's a good idea, the problem is that we don't Know how to make this box." But if all goes well, scientists hope that within 40 years ITER could pave the way for the commercialization of fusion energy, the kind that could power our homes.Fusion reactors may one day alleviate our energy problems, releasing solar-level energy safely here on Earth.
But even a magnetic confinement reactor wouldn't provide enough energy to power a Death Star-style weapon.To do this, we need a new design.
There is another possibility of simulating the Death Star laser cannon with today's technology, and that is to use hydrogen bombs.A cluster of X-ray lasers harnesses and concentrates the power of a nuclear weapon, theoretically generating enough power to run a device that could incinerate an entire planet.
Nuclear power releases about 100 million times the energy of a chemical reactor, pound for pound.A serving of enriched uranium smaller than a baseball is enough to destroy a city in a blazing fireball—even if only 1% of its mass is converted to energy.As we've already discussed, there are many ways to inject energy into a laser beam.By far the most powerful method is to harness the power unleashed by an atomic bomb.
X-ray lasers have enormous scientific and military value.Because of their extremely short wavelengths, they can be used to probe atomic distances and decipher the atomic structure of complex molecules, a feat that is extremely difficult to accomplish using ordinary methods.When you "see" the atoms in motion and the atoms themselves lined up inside the molecule, a whole new window of chemistry opens up.
X-rays can also be powered by nuclear weapons, since hydrogen bombs release enormous amounts of energy in the X-ray range.The person most associated with X-ray lasers was physicist Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb.
Taylor, of course, was the same physicist who testified to the US Congress in the 1950s that Robert Oppenheimer, who was in charge of the Manhattan Project, could not credibly continue working on the hydrogen bomb because of his political leanings.Taylor's testimony discredited Oppenheimer and had his security clearance revoked.Many eminent physicists could never forgive Taylor for what he did.
(My own connection to Taylor goes back to my high school days. At that time, I conducted a series of experiments on the properties of antimatter, won the San Francisco Science Fair and a trip to Albuquerque, New Mexico. ) trips to national science fairs. I appeared with Taylor on local TV, and he had an interest in bright young physicists. I ended up with Taylor’s Hertz Engineering Scholarship, which paid for my time at Harvard The cost of an undergraduate education in college. I visit Taylor at his Berkeley home a few times a year and know his family quite well.)
Essentially, Taylor's X-ray laser was a small atomic bomb surrounded by a copper rod.The detonation of a nuclear weapon releases an intense X-ray spherical shock.These high-energy rays then pass through a copper rod that acts as laser emitting material, concentrating the energy of the X-rays into an intense X-ray beam.These X-ray beams then become warheads aimed at the enemy.Naturally, such a device could only be used once, since an atomic explosion would cause the X-ray laser to self-destruct.
The first experiment with a nuclear-powered X-ray laser, known as the Cagra test, took place in 1983 in an underground shaft.A hydrogen bomb is detonated, and its wave of incoherent X-rays is then focused into a coherent X-ray laser beam.Initially, the experiment was seen as a major success, and in fact inspired President Ronald Reagan in 1983 to announce his intention to create a "Star Wars" defense program in a historic speech.Thus began a multibillion-dollar project that continues even today—to build arrays of nuclear-powered X-ray laser-like devices to shoot down enemy The measuring probe was destroyed, so its readings were unreliable).
Could such a much-debated device actually be used to shoot down ICBM warheads now?Maybe.However, the enemy can use a variety of simple and cheap methods to disable this weapon (for example, the enemy can send millions of cheap false targets to fool the radar, or rotate the warhead to disperse X-rays, or emit a chemical coating to counter X-rays); alternatively, the enemy could simply mass-produce warheads to penetrate Star Wars defensive shields.
So, nuclear-powered X-ray lasers are currently as impractical as missile defense systems.But is it possible to create a Death Star to deal with an approaching asteroid, or wipe out an entire planet entirely?
Can a weapon that destroys an entire planet like in "Star Wars" be made?In theory, the answer is yes.There are several ways to make them.
First, there is no physical limit to the amount of energy a hydrogen bomb can release.Here's how it works (the precise gist of the hydrogen bomb is top secret and is classified even today by the US government, but the rough gist is widely known).A hydrogen bomb is actually made up of multiple stages of reactions.By adding up these steps in the right order, atomic bombs of almost every magnitude can be made.
The first stage is a standard fission bomb that uses uranium-235 to release a burst of X-rays, like the one used in the Hiroshima atomic bomb.In less than a second, the air wave released by the atomic bomb swept everything away, and the expanding sphere of X-rays rushed ahead of the air wave (because it was moving at the speed of light), and then refocused on a lithium deuteride-hydrogen bomb. on the container of the active substance (how to do this is still classified). X-rays hit the lithium deuteride, causing it to collapse and heat it to millions of degrees, creating a second explosion, much more violent than the first.The X-rays erupting from this hydrogen bomb can then be refocused onto a second lithium deuteride container, creating a third explosion.In this way, we can stack lithium deuteride next to each other to create a hydrogen bomb of unimaginable power.In fact, the largest hydrogen bomb ever built, a two-stage hydrogen bomb detonated by the Soviet Union in 1961, had the energy of 50 million tons of TNT, although it could theoretically detonate with more than 100 million tons of TNT energy (or about 5,000 times the Hiroshima atomic bomb).
Burning down an entire planet, however, is a whole other order of magnitude.To do this, the Death Star would have to activate thousands of these X-ray lasers in space, and they would all have to fire at the same time (for comparison, at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States each had amassed about 30,000 lasers). atomic bomb).The total energy of such a huge number of X-ray lasers is enough to burn the surface of a planet.So, it's entirely possible that a Galactic Empire will create such a weapon in the next few million years.
For a very advanced civilization, there is a second option: use a gamma ray burst to create a Death Star.Such a dead star would release a burst of rays immediately after a big explosion. Gamma ray bursts occur naturally in outer space, and it is conceivable that an advanced civilization would harness their enormous power.By controlling the rotation of a star before it collapses and unleashes a supernova, we might be able to target gamma rays at any point in space.
Gamma-ray bursts were actually first observed in the 1970s, when the US military launched the Vela satellite to detect a "nukeflash" (evidence of an unauthorized atomic bomb detonation).But instead of the nuclear flash, Vera detects a powerful burst of rays from space.The discovery initially caused a wave of trepidation in the Pentagon: Was the Soviet Union testing a new nuclear weapon in space?These radiations were later determined to be coming from all directions in the sky evenly, meaning they were in fact coming from outside the Milky Way.But if they come from outside the Milky Way, they must release a truly astronomical amount of energy, enough to light up the entire visible universe.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, astronomers were shocked when huge amounts of astronomical data were suddenly declassified by the Pentagon.Suddenly, astronomers realize that a new mysterious phenomenon is staring back at them face to face, and it will rewrite science textbooks.
Because gamma-ray bursts last only seconds to minutes before disappearing, an elaborate detector is necessary to identify and analyze them.First, a satellite detects the first ray burst and sends the exact coordinates of the burst back to Earth.These coordinates are then transmitted to an optical or radio telescope where the location of the gamma-ray burst is aligned.
While many details are sure to remain under wraps, there is one theory about the origin of gamma-ray bursts—they are "hypernovas" of infinite energy that wake up to leave behind massive black holes.It appears that gamma-ray bursts are giant black holes lined up.
But the black hole emits two radiation "jets", one from the N pole and the other from the S pole, shaped like a spinning top.观测到的一次来自远方的γ射线爆发的辐射显然是去往地球的喷射之一。如果γ射线爆发的喷射瞄准地球，并且γ射线爆发就在我们银河中的邻近位置（离地球数百光年），那么其威力足以毁灭我们星球上的一切生命。
首先，γ射线爆发的X射线脉冲波会创造一次能摧毁地球上所有电子设备的电磁脉冲。其强烈的X射线和γ射线光束足以毁坏地球大气层，毁灭保护我们的臭氧层，γ射线的喷射随即会使地球表面温度升高，导致巨大的爆炸风暴，最终会吞噬整个星球。γ射线爆破或许不会真的让整个地球像在电影《星球大战》中那样爆炸，但它肯定会消灭所有的生命，留下一个焦黑、贫瘠的星球。
可以想象，一个比我们先进数十万年到数百万年的文明或许可以将这样一个黑洞瞄准目标的方向。这可以通过以精确的角度将行星和中子星的路径在一颗死亡中的恒星即将坍缩之前调整到它的路径来实现。这一调整足以改变一颗恒星的自转轴，这样它就可以瞄准到特定的方向。死亡中的恒星可以成为我们所能想象到的最大的镭射枪。
总的来说，使用威力巨大的激光制造便携的或手持的镭射枪和光剑可以归入“一等不可思议”——在近期或一个世纪内可能实现的事物。但是，将一颗自转中的恒星在其爆发成为黑洞之前进行瞄准，并且将其转变为一颗死星——这样的高难度挑战只能视为“二等不可思议”——显然不违反物理定律（这样的γ射线爆发存在）、但或许只能在未来数千年到数百万年中成为可能的事物。
Notes:
Notes: