An Energy Audit of a Giant Glitch: Battery, Store and Switch

Energy is the most basic audit a glitch model must pass. This study audits a giant Vela glitch in energy terms, comparing the rotational energy the crust gains with the reservoirs that could supply it and the triggers that could release it. For a representative giant glitch of fractional size 2.4e-6, the crust's rotational energy gain is 1.2e+36 J. The superfluid lag reservoir of the crust holds 1.2e+37 J at the critical lag, enough for about 10 such glitches per full accumulation, while the crust's total elastic strain reservoir is 2.7e+39 J, larger by a factor of 2274. By contrast, a single local crust failure of hundred-metre scale releases only 2.0e+33 J, a factor of 609 below the glitch's energy gain. Energy therefore flows from rotation through the lag reservoir, and local failures can act only as triggers that unpin vortices, never as the energy source: a crustquake-powered glitch is excluded by arithmetic. This study is simulated and computed from stated assumptions; it is not a measurement.