Fizziks

[moth_wingthane]

Minor ponderance as I'm watching Alien: Covenant - Mother sends the alert that a neutrino burst has been detected, fair enough. I'm not a particle astro physicist, so how would you know a neutrino burst has occurred before it actually reached your ship? And could neutrinos damage anything in the first place?

Comments

[aerospiritual]

The only thing I can imagine is if the ship had some kind of sonar-based sensory system that would bounce back off of neutrino particles so that they could detect the emissions from a distance- as for the damage they could cause?

whoooooo knows, hahahahaha. I think they're just trying to sound smart and science-y.

[moth_wingthane]

hehe Welcome to Movieland!

And it's good to hear from you. I was wondering if you were still out there :)

[aerospiritual]

still here! just always a quiet observer, hahaha

[sunfire]

Fits right in a movie series where alien life forms attach themselves to a victim's face, give them a mouth full of alien penis, then burst out of the victim's body like a bat out of hell. *laughs*

[moth_wingthane]

It's all pretty gross really. I do wonder why I choose to watch these things sometimes :D

[lupine52]

Oh I think the answer to that is quite simple; its dystopian science fiction, and its pretty bleak when the future consists of a government (corporation) that is willing to sacrifice its crew in hopes to capture an alien lifeform that can be used as a bio-weapon.

As for the neutrino thingie, when I hear neutrino I think of the StarTrek neutrino which can form a field which thus have shape. -- I don't know if neutrinos could be the carriers but there is a belief that the computers of the future might use light waves within carbon nanotubes as a method to transmit data. Since much heat is created from this processing perhaps this energy can be trapped and sent as an energy wave of sort. the beam would include the neutrinos and a heat signature which could be detected I suppose.

[schnee]

Now, I'm no physicist either, and I don't even play one on TV, but - my entirely lay understanding is that detecting a neutrino burst before it reaches the ship should be nigh impossible, for two reasons.

First, neutrinos are (virtually) massless and travel at (virtually) the speed of light, so a detector near the source of the burst could not transmit information about the burst faster than the neutrinos themselves would travel. As such, by the time you'd get the message that "neutrinos are coming", the neutrinos themselves would also already be arriving.

Second, neutrino detectors are massive things, and difficult to construct; we're not talking portable Geiger counters here, more like "50,000 tons of ultra-pure water in a 40×40m cylindrical steel tank that's literally 1 kilometer below ground". But wait, I hear you say, couldn't technological advances allow for smaller detectors? It's not a priori impossible, of course, but there's a reason these things are so large (and so shielded from outside influence): neutrinos simply don't

[thewayne]

I also am not an astrophysicist, but I am married to one! She has a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics, and has appeared on several TV programs including Mythbusters. Yeah, neutrinos are pretty much harmless, but still something to study and currently have MASSIVE detectors. So something like the scene postulated would require huge advances in tech.

Gamma-ray bursts, on the other hand, are something else entirely! Spousal unit says that if Betelgeuse ever goes ka-blooey, it will be sleeting the planet with so much gamma that EVERYONE will have to stay indoors when that (former) star is in the sky! Eventually that blast wave will pass, and normally activity would resume.

[schnee]

Cool, thanks for the info. :)

Would staying indoors actually be enough to avoid harm in case of that sort of gamma-ray burst? (Also, wouldn't animals and plants that couldn't be moved indoors suffer, leading to a radical change in that biosphere that would affect humans even if they weren't harmed directly?)

[thewayne]

She says it's actually x-rays that's the problem, and I was mis-remembering about GRB's. She says a GRB is most likely the coalescence of two neutron stars, has nothing to do with a star going nova or supernova. So we'd see Betelgeuse go boom through normal visual observation, not through a GRB detection. Whenever there's a gamma-ray burst it triggers a pre-empt of the scheduled science programs at their observatories and at many around the world and telescopes slew to try and record what happened