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Ejection From Fastest Known Revolving Neutron Star 44

Posted by timothy from the spin-spin-spin dept.
nachoworld writes: "In a similar vein to the neutron star article posted earlier today, this more interesting NS has emitted a 3-hour long (1000x longer than normal) explosion by fusing the mass of its mostly helium neighbor. In that pluto-sized ejection, the NS emitted enough energy to keep the sun burning for 20 years. On a side note, this is the one and the same neutron star of 4U 1820-30, which is the fastest spining binary known to man (11-minute cycles)."
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Ejection From Fastest Known Revolving Neutron Star More

Ejection From Fastest Known Revolving Neutron Star

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  • Hmm... one couple of celestial bodies twirling around each other at stellar speeds causing a build-up of material which ends in a massive eruption/explosion lasting for three whole hours.

    Go back and read that paragraph, then tell me that you don't see the freudian image painted in that. Damned, it's more blatantly obvious than Adam and Eve. Maybe the 3 hour "bang" disproves the "big-bang" theory :)

    Conclusion: Sex while suspended in weightless space environment can cause massive build-up and eruption :) (why else are they making bungie sex-seats which are supposed to simulate sex in a weightless environment?)
  • I went to the article and the first thing I see is
    "an artists rendering of a neutron star".
    I can imagine when he was drawing that, an astronomer goes up to him and says "oooh, I like the yellows, but can you cut down on the greens a bit, however those black flecks are wonderful".
    Has the artist seen one? Has the astronomer seen one with visible light? No, and No.
    Artists impression, tish.

    FatPhil

  • depression (Score:3)

    by snyrt ( 151824 ) <snyrt@onebox.com> on Saturday November 11, 2000 @08:12PM (#629755) Homepage
    all these space stories depress me. I mean, sure, we just noticed something amazing happening in the sky. this is, literally, old news. These events occured hundreds of thousands of years ago and the light is just now getting here. we'll never be able to see what's happening realtime until we get close enough, and even then it's not quite realtime, but slightly lagged. oh well, i won't get anal about it, but it's old news, but i still care.

  • amen (Score:1)

    by prok ( 8502 )
    I was about to say the same thing...

    There was almost a point to the post if you realize that not everyone is familiar with the basics of astronomy.

  • Neutron Stars - Pulsars (Score:5)

    by Kotetsu ( 135021 ) on Saturday November 11, 2000 @08:18PM (#629757) Homepage
    The submission has one detail wrong - the neutron star is orbiting the other star in only 11 minutes. The situation is the same as the Earth going around the sun (the definition of a year) in only 11 minutes.

    Neutron stars actually spin much faster than that. The neutron star B1937+21, discovered in 1982 rotates in 1.6 milliseconds (625 full spins per second). Rapidly spinning neutron stars are also called pulsars, because of the radio pulses they emit. One of the first pulsars discovered was the neutron star in the middle of the Crab Nebula, which rotates 33 times per second.

    Obligatory links:
    Jodrell Bank [man.ac.uk]
    Parkes [astro.it]
    Arecibo [naic.edu]
  • Don't worry.

    Relatively may tell you that you're lagged*, but it also tells you that it doesn't matter.
    Unless you want to interact with it, in which case it's not the speed of light and the _time_ lag that's stopping you, it's simply the distance.

    FatPhil
    * Actually the fixed speed of light is a postulate that special relativity uses as an input not a conclusion from relativity, but I digress.
  • You dont really know how far into space was this event noticed with their telescopes, which would cut the time of arrival, by some certain amount. So it may not have necessarily happened so long ago...

    --

  • That's what I was thinking.
    -J
  • Man, the fastest ejection from my stars I could manage was about five minutes.

    You guys are high performance!
  • That's right buddy, it's me again, I came back just to re-iterate: You are a FUCKING IDIOT. FUCKING.
  • Whoa, and I thought the 1.2GHz Athlon could spin binaries faster than any other known processor! To think of... oh, wait... *cough* I'll get me coat.

    --Bud

  • Pluto-sized ejection? Sounds rough... that star might want to go have a doctor check that out...

    Hey, at least it's smaller than Uranus.

    --
    Evan "Who can't believe he's posting this" E.

  • Probably just a poor choice of words. Note the original poster said that the *binary* spins. Both the members of the binary system are (probably) orbiting each other(or, more correctly, the mid point of their two masses - I forget the technical term), so from one perspective, you could say that the *system* 'spins'.

    FWIW, IANAA.
  • Well, it might be a better way than we do it here...
  • is how big that Burrito must have been?!
  • If you hadn't AC'd you'd probably got a +1 funny.

    FP
  • actually, I don't find it very funny at all.
  • hmmm... so if we managed to blow up pluto...

    _________________________________
    I came... I saw... I commented.
  • You know, something that big spinning that fast gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "spin cycle".

  • The obvious solution. (Score:3)

    by Christopher Thomas ( 11717 ) on Saturday November 11, 2000 @07:14PM (#629772)
    Who cares?
    Or is this now Slashdot - news for Astrophysicists?

    Um, you *do* have the option of excluding "space" from your list of categories to be displayed. hit the "preferences" link on the left of your screen.

    And as the astrophyics stories get a fair number of on-topic posts once they've been up for a while, I'd say that a significant segment of the slashdot readership is interested in them.

  • Some links. (Score:3)

    by bcrowell ( 177657 ) on Saturday November 11, 2000 @08:33PM (#629773) Homepage
    Here [nasa.gov] is a link to the author's home page. You can download his papers there.

    Here [man.ac.uk] is a page with a tutorial on pulsars. You can listen to them, too!

    This isn't just a "biggest explosion, gee whiz" story. As the article notes, very little is known about the interior of neutron stars, and this explosion probes deeper inside. As explained on this [uchicago.edu] nifty page about neutron stars, there could even be all kinds of exotic stuff inside them, like strange-quark matter.

    --

  • "It must be aliens trying to contact..." -- wait, press release budget meet, never mind.

  • Pluto-sized ejection? Sounds rough... that star might want to go have a doctor check that out...
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Even if washing machines were the size of small stars and spun at the mind-boggling rate of eleven minutes per rotation, you'd still be a FUCKING idiot.
  • Too bad they are. But then again, SETI@Home provides far more processing capability than average funding would. It's astronomical research that is underfunded and that is a shame. [Inane, somwhat witty comment deleted.] [Shameless URL plug deleted.]
  • Though you must admit that they do crowd out the ever-popular series of :CueCat stories.

    (Next week on Slashdot: Tune in to learn how to hack your :CueCat to keep it from violating your privacy by backing over it with your pickup. Also, whether voting for Nader in 2004 is a good idea.)

  • Reminds me of all the anime series just now coming to America that ended years ago in Japan.. It's just as sad..

    --
  • Finally, we have a story on /. that can't have an election-related joke tagged to it.

    - Joe

  • Which is pretty impressive, I might add. The story is interesting, but there's not much to comment on the citius, altius, fortius of stars. Most people have just been making lame jokes, and I think anything else deserves applause.

  • Extended explosion=Extended range? (Score:3)

    by coryboehne ( 244614 ) on Saturday November 11, 2000 @08:58PM (#629783)
    Here's an on-topic question, I'm not much of a phsyicist so I will need some clarification on this subject, if the explosion is 1000x longer, is it 1000x more powerful, I mean is the range at which it affects other heavenly bodies extended, or it is the same range, just a much longer exposure?
  • Consider: Even if the telescope was on the moon, it takes only about 4 seconds for the signal to reach here from the moon. That cuts the hundred-thousand years down by not a lot.
  • Retro-burn...

    Here they come.

  • Would that be a Beowulf Shaeffer cluster? :-)
  • Twenty-thousand years, according to the article, but still a Very Long Time.
  • Well, this didn't go very far into the neutron star. This explosion was apparently only a layer of carbon on the surface which ignited. As the article mentions, there was a "normal" 10-second explosion at the beginning -- apparently this was a helium fusion blast, which apparently was the last straw and ignited the carbon fusion. This link [spacedaily.com] describes a similar event, although the new one was 3 hours and thus much longer-lasting. Well, sometimes the dead wood piles up longer before something ignites it...
  • The duration of the event was about 3 hours, i.e. about 10000 sec, and the article says that is was "500-1000 times more energetic" than a normal event, which is something like 10 sec long. Thus, the power (energy/sec, in whatever units) apparently was similar to a normal event, and only the length of this event was different.

    BTW, the article doesn't mention that any mass was ejected from the neutron star (all what is measured is X-ray emission). If thermonuclear burning on the neutron star has occured for a few hours, the burning layer most likely was in some temporarily stable state, which does not favour the idea of mass ejection.

  • I'm currently sitting in an office in Hong Kong gazing over the rain-soaked harbour, and nursing a huge hangover from a night of over-excess.

    I just read this article and have realised the insignificance of my being... it's too much!!

    Please can you warn other readers like myself before trying to blow our minds early on Sunday Mornings. Otherwise many of us will lose our minds ;-)

    Getting on topic: I wish I had listened much more in those physics classes I failed!

  • Imagine if we had a Beowulf cluster of those...er...nevermind.

  • I'm afraid we are out of English or Oregon cheddar, sir.

    Of course we have double creme brie, we are a cheese shop, sir.

    Oh sorry, the cat eated it, sir.

  • Just make sure you don't buy any Swiss cheese from Palm Beach, Florida. They punch the holes in the wrong places.

    - Joe

  • yeah, good point. that would be tough to imagine. ah, well. i apologize. guess i'm just a bit trigger happy in catching two stories on the homepage, just out of dumb luck and not from impulsive reloading. I'll try to calm down now, and perhaps sleep it off. You know, Slashdot is more addictive than Caffeine...
  • In other news, sources close to the White House have confirmed that Bill Clinton has already begun teaching Al Gore all he knows about the ejections. Suprisingly, the famous inventor had never heard of them.

    Thank you.

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