- 2950 - NEUTRON STARS - it dosn’t get any stranger? Astronomy has many, many strange things to try to figure out. Let’s start with “neutron stars“. The crushing gravity, intense magnetic fields, and lightning-fast rotations place “neutron stars” among the most exotic beasts in the universe. Next come the most powerful magnetic fields in the universe wrack the searing surfaces of neutron stars called “magnetars“. These magnetic monsters form one of the most eccentric branches on the neutron star-pulsar family tree.
- Astronomy is deep reading. It is easier to give a cat a pill. Here are 15 steps to give a cat a pill , follow carefully.
-
- 1. Pick up cat and cradle it in the crook of your left arm as if holding a baby. Position right forefinger and thumb on either side of cat's mouth and gently apply pressure to cheeks while holding pill in right hand. As cat opens mouth, pop pill into mouth. Allow cat to close mouth and swallow.
-
- 2. Retrieve pill from floor and cat from behind sofa. Cradle cat in left arm and repeat process.
-
- 3. Retrieve cat from bedroom, and throw soggy pill away.
-
- 4. Take new pill from foil wrap, cradle cat in left arm, holding rear paws tightly with left hand. Force jaws open and push pill to back of mouth with right forefinger. Hold mouth shut for a count of ten.
-
- 5. Retrieve pill from goldfish bowl and cat from top of wardrobe. Call spouse from garden.
-
- 6. Kneel on floor with cat wedged firmly between knees, hold front and rear paws. Ignore low growls emitted by cat. Get spouse to hold head firmly with one hand while forcing wooden ruler into mouth Drop pill down ruler and rub cat's throat vigorously.
-
- 7. Retrieve cat from curtain rail, get another pill from foil wrap. Make note to buy new ruler and repair curtains. Carefully sweep shattered figurines and vases from hearth and set to one side for gluing later.
-
- 8. Wrap cat in large towel and get spouse to lie on cat with head just visible from below armpit. Put pill in end of drinking straw, force mouth open with pencil and blow down drinking straw.
-
- 9. Check label to make sure pill not harmful to humans, drink 1 beer to take taste away. Apply Band-Aid to spouse's forearm and remove blood from carpet with cold water and soap.
-
- 10 . Retrieve cat from neighbor's shed. Get another pill. Open another beer. Place cat in cupboard, and close door on to neck, to leave head showing. Force mouth open with dessert spoon. Flick pill down throat with elastic band.
-
- 11. Fetch screwdriver from garage and put cupboard door back on hinges. Drink beer. Fetch bottle of scotch. Pour shot, drink. Apply cold compress to cheek and check records for date of last tetanus shot. Apply whiskey compress to cheek to disinfect. Toss back another shot. Throw Tee shirt away and fetch new one from bedroom.
-
- 12. Call fire department to retrieve the damn cat from across the road. Apologize to neighbor who crashed into fence while swerving to avoid cat. Take last pill from foil wrap.
-
- 13. Tie the little bastard's front paws to rear paws with garden twine and bind tightly to leg of dining table, find heavy-duty pruning gloves from shed. Push pill into mouth followed by large piece of filet steak. Be rough about it. Hold head vertically and pour 2 pints of water down throat to wash pill down.
-
- 14. Consume remainder of scotch. Get spouse to drive you to the emergency room, sit quietly while doctor stitches fingers and forearm and removes pill remnants from right eye. Call furniture shop on way home to order new table.
-
- 15 . Arrange for SPCA to collect mutant cat from hell and call local pet shop to see if they have any hamsters.
-
---------------------------- How To Give A Dog A Pill :
-
1. Wrap it in bacon.
-
2. Toss it in the air. ok, back to astronomy:
-
-
------------------ 2950 - NEUTRON STARS - it dosn’t get any stranger?
-
- “Black holes” produce an “event horizon” from which not even light can escape. “Neutron stars“, on the other hand, fall just short of that in having enough gravity to become a blackhole. Neutron stars can display an array of amazing behavior available for all to see: radio, X-ray, and gamma-ray pulses; thermonuclear X-ray bursts; and spontaneous rotational changes. Linked to magnetic fields trillions of times stronger than Earth’s, these phenomena continue to challenge scientific understanding.
-
- Neutron stars pack a mass equivalent to half a million Earths into a sphere about 12 miles across and typically rotate hundreds to thousands of times per minute. Their large masses and small sizes result in gravitational fields at their surfaces more than 100 billion times stronger than Earth’s, enough to substantially warp space-time and allow precise tests of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
-
- Neutron star matter, crushed to densities greater than that of an atomic nucleus. The electrons in all the atoms are compressed into the nucleus protons to form neutrons. The nucleus is so compressed that a thimbleful would hold twice the mass of all 7.4 billion people alive on Earth.
-
- Their cores, with hundreds of millions of tons squeezed into each cubic centimeter, are so compact that scientists don’t really understand what state of matter that prevails there. We don’t know if it is a sea of quarks, or a soup of neutrons with other exotic particles, It is certainly not atomic matter as we know it here on Earth.
-
- If you want to see a neutron star check out the bright spot at the center of the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant it is surprisingly sedate neutron star. The remnant lies about 11,000 light-years from Earth and spans 29 light-years.
-
- Understanding the diversity of neutron star properties, particularly their masses, sizes, and spins, is one way astronomers can effectively look inside. The goal is to set stronger limits on the way pressure changes with density, the so-called “equation of state“, inside the neutron star.
-
- Neutron star, PSR J0348+0432, is the heaviest neutron star with a precise mass measurement, weighing in at twice the Sun’s mass. Because its internal structure must be rigid enough to support this weight and prevent further collapse into a blackhole, a neutron star this massive argues against equations of state where the core is filled with “squishier” versions of exotic matter.
-
- In principle, spinning neutron stars could provide clues to internal structure because at some speed, they must simply fly apart. Some models predict a breakup near 2,000 rotations per second, while others indicate disruption at around 1,200. PSR J1748–2446ad is another neutron star that holds the record for fastest known spin, at 716 times per second.
-
- What’s missing is a better knowledge of the masses and sizes of neutron stars. The “Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer“ (NICER) observatory is designed to address this gap. The observatory, which launched in June, 2020, is mounted on the skyward side of the International Space Station. Among the mission’s top science goals is to measure the radii of at least three neutron stars to an unprecedented accuracy of 5 percent.
-
- The “Black Widow pulsar”, PSR J1311–3430, blasts its binary companion with powerful radiation and a strong wind of high-energy particles. The onslaught heats up and eventually will evaporate the companion star, now whittled down to about 1 percent of the Sun’s mass.
-
- The more mass a star begins life with, the brighter it shines and the faster it runs through its fuel supply. Nuclear fusion transforms hydrogen into helium, producing energy in the form of gamma rays and neutrinos, which are ghostly particles that travel at nearly the speed of light and rarely interact with matter.
-
- Once these reactions deplete the hydrogen, the star’s core contracts and heats until the accumulated helium “waste” ignites, generating energy by fusing helium nuclei into carbon and oxygen.
-
- For stars born with less than about 8 solar masses, the recycling program typically ends there. For most of these stars, the core contracts and heats up again but never reaches temperatures high enough to fuse carbon.
-
- At the high end of this mass range, however, stars proceed to fuse carbon and produce cores of oxygen, neon, and magnesium. They reach a point where further collapse stops and temperatures don’t climb high enough to make use of the remaining fuel.
-
- As the core collapses into smaller volumes, electrons are forced to occupy higher energy states and to move faster. Because of a quirk of quantum mechanics known as the “Pauli exclusion principle“, no two electrons can share the same energy state, so the fastest electrons can’t slow down. This “electron degeneracy” results in a countervailing pressure that supports the star. As long as the core weighs less than about 1.4 solar masses, the collapse ceases, and it becomes a “white dwarf“ star.
-
- Stars between about 8 and 20 solar masses can reach the higher temperatures needed to fuse more advanced fuels. As each runs low, first carbon, then neon, oxygen, and silicon, the core contracts, heats up, and ignites waste from the previous reactions.
-
- Once silicon fusion begins and an iron-nickel core starts to form, the star’s days are numbered. When the final collapse comes, a series of unfortunate events brings about a supernova explosion that tears the star apart but leaves behind its crushed core, a neutron star.
-
- When the core’s temperature reaches 18 billion degrees Fahrenheit (10 billion Kelvins), gamma rays begin to split iron nuclei. Instead of adding energy to the core, this process takes it away, breaking iron into helium nuclei and neutrons.
-
- The helium quickly absorbs gamma rays and dissociates into protons and neutrons. By the time electron degeneracy starts, the electrons are disappearing, merging with protons to produce neutrons and neutrinos. The neutrinos escape easily, another process that takes support from the doomed stellar core, and the numbers of electrons and protons each drop to about 10 percent of the number of neutrons.
-
- As the collapse proceeds and the core temperature becomes a hundred times hotter, neutrons begin exerting their own degeneracy pressure. The core stiffens, halting the collapse and sending a powerful outward-moving shock wave through stellar layers continuing to rain down on the nascent neutron star.
-
- The shock briefly stalls, but astronomers think the flood of neutrinos pouring from the core re-energizes it. The shock then moves outward again, destroying the star’s outer layers in a supernova explosion and leaving behind a neutron star.
-
- In 1939, J. Robert Oppenheimer and George Volkoff, both at the University of California, Berkeley, showed that neutron degeneracy alone cannot halt the collapse of a core weighing more than 70 percent of the Sun’s mass.
-
- Later studies factored in the pressure produced by strong repulsive nuclear forces, bringing the theoretical maximum to about 3 solar masses. Beyond this limit, reached by stars born with more than 20 solar masses, core collapse cannot be stopped, and the remnant becomes a blackhole.
-
- Although Zwicky and Baade predicted neutron stars in 1934, astronomers didn’t detect one until 1967. That’s when Antony Hewish and Jocelyn Bell Burnell, working at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory near Cambridge, England, discovered the precisely timed radio emissions these stellar remnants produce.
-
- These objects were referred to as “pulsating radio sources,” later shortened to “pulsar.” The name stuck, and astronomers have cataloged more than 2,600 radio pulsars in our galaxy since. Many of them now have been detected in X-rays and gamma rays as well.
-
- Nearly all known neutron stars have detectable pulsations at some wavelength because they rotate rapidly and possess hot spots at their magnetic poles. So, for the most part, the terms pulsar and neutron star can be regarded as synonyms.
-
- The quietest ones, called central compact objects, appear near the centers of young supernova remnants and radiate only low-energy X-rays. They’re weak, thermal X-ray sources, hot neutron stars.
-
- Astronomers have seen X-ray pulsations with periods of a few tenths of a second in a few members of this class. The emissions indicate the objects have surprisingly weak magnetic fields incapable of producing the activity seen in other types of neutron stars.
-
- The magnetic field is everything for a neutron star, probably determining all of its behavior. One possibility is that their normal fields get “buried” when a small amount of stellar material falls back onto the neutron stars within hours of their births.
-
- A 2015 study found that a modest amount of material, less than 10 times the mass of Jupiter, may be enough to force a typical trillion-gauss pulsar magnetic field beneath the surface. This is only temporary and the field will re-emerge a few thousand years later. It suggests weak fields may be somewhat common in newly minted neutron stars.
-
- Isolated neutron stars form another distinct class, one with only seven confirmed members. These objects are less than 1,600 light-years away, lack any associated supernova remnant or pulsar-produced nebula, and emit only low-energy X-rays with weak pulses ranging from 3 to 11 seconds.
-
- They appear to be middle-aged, cooling neutron stars with stronger-than-average magnetic fields. If the fields decayed from much higher values, these objects could be old versions of magnetars, which sport the strongest fields of the neutron star family.
-
- Astronomers classify neutron stars according to the main energy source powering their emissions and changes in spin. “Rotation-powered pulsars“, like those in the Crab and Vela supernova remnants, tap into their rotational energy to produce pulsations from radio to gamma rays and to drive a powerful outflow of charged particles. These emissions gradually slow the object’s spin.
-
- The outflow, called a “pulsar wind” and composed primarily of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, creates a glowing nebula typically but not exclusively found around young pulsars. X-ray studies of features in the Crab and Vela pulsar wind nebulae reveal structures moving outward at half the speed of light.
-
- “Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope” has discovered that the very high-energy gamma rays are coming from the outer parts of the magnetosphere. Typically, gamma-ray pulses lag well behind the radio pulses, which means they must be produced some 10 times farther away from the pulsar.
-
- Timing the radio pulses of neutron stars is an astonishingly precise business. Astronomers can measure the spin period of pulsars to 15 decimal places. If we could measure the Moon’s distance this precisely, we would know its position to within 0.4 micrometer, about one-fifth the thickness of a human red blood cell.
-
- Some rotation-powered pulsars have spins, exceeding 100 times per second. Most of these so-called millisecond pulsars reside in binary systems. Astronomers think they were born with more typical periods and were slowing gradually over tens of millions of years.
-
- Eventually the companions stars evolve and enlarge to the point where a steady stream of gas fell onto the neutron stars, revving them up to the rapid periods we see today.
-
- In some close systems, emission from the reinvigorated pulsar blasts the companion, heating its atmosphere and slowly whittling it away. Eventually, only the neutron star will remain, helping explain why roughly 20 percent of recycled pulsars have no stellar partner. Depending on the current mass of the companion star, astronomers classify these systems as “black widows” or “redbacks“, named after spiders that can turn on their mates.
-
- Millisecond pulsars are the most stable clocks in the neutron star family. This makes them useful tools in the search for gravitational waves, the ripples in space-time produced by merging black holes and other events that constantly jostle Earth. By monitoring the spins of dozens of pulsars distributed around the sky, astronomers effectively have created a galaxy-sized detector to find these signals and measure how the waves stretch and squeeze our planet.
-
- Accreting neutron stars might be the most social class of these objects because they are actively accumulating matter from binary companions. In low-mass X-ray binaries, the compact object is either a neutron star or a blackhole, and the donor star is either a white dwarf, a red giant, or a Sun-like star. Neutron stars in these systems are old and have magnetic fields 10,000 times weaker than typical radio pulsars.
-
- A strong wind blows from the pulsar PSR B1509–58, exciting the surrounding supernova remnant to glow brightly in X-rays. The neutron star spins nearly seven times per second and lies some 17,000 light-years from Earth in Circinus.
-
- As gas flows toward the neutron star, it forms a hot accretion disk before streaming onto the star, producing a force that can gradually increase its spin.
-
- In 2001, optical studies of the SDSS J102347.6+003841 system showed clear signs of an accretion disk, but those features disappeared by 2003. Then, in 2007, astronomers discovered millisecond radio pulsations, suggesting the system intermittently accretes material as part of its final transition from an X-ray binary to a recycled pulsar.
-
- In some of these systems, neutron stars erupt in sudden bursts of X-rays that repeat after some time. Hydrogen flows onto the neutron star and immediately fuses, producing a growing layer of helium that covers the entire surface. Eventually, the helium layer undergoes explosive fusion that produces a bright burst of X-rays, and the process repeats.
-
- High-mass X-ray binaries pair a neutron star or a black hole with a hot “O” or “B” type star holding 10 or more times the Sun’s mass. The massive star’s immense luminosity drives a continuous outflow of gas that the compact object sweeps up. These binaries have X-ray pulsation periods that range from one to hundreds of seconds and magnetic fields with strengths typical of radio pulsars.
-
- Because massive stars must eventually collapse and become supernovae, many of these systems will evolve into binaries containing a pair of neutron stars.
-
- In 1974 astronomers discovered the radio pulsar B1913+16, which spins nearly 17 times per second. After monitoring it for a while, they noticed periodic changes indicating the pulsar has a companion, another neutron star, though this one has no detectable pulsations.
-
- After following the system for a few years the orbits were shrinking in accordance with Einstein’s prediction that the stars must lose orbital energy by emitting gravitational waves.
-
- Astronomers have now measured orbital decays for many other double neutron stars as well as for a few millisecond pulsar-white dwarf binaries. One of these systems really stands out. PSR J0737−3039 is the most compact double neutron star binary known, with an orbital period of just 2.45 hours. And both are also pulsars, making this the only known double pulsar and a unique laboratory for studying gravitational physics.
-
- Magnetars make up the final branch of the family tree. Of the 2,600 neutron stars known, only 29 belong to this group. Their magnetic fields are the strongest in the cosmos, 100 to 1,000 times stronger than those found in typical rotation-powered pulsars.
-
- Magnetars come in two varieties, soft gamma-ray repeaters (SGRs) and anomalous X-ray pulsars, that scientists originally thought were unrelated. They have spin periods between 2 and 12 seconds and undergo episodes of repeated X-ray and gamma-ray bursts lasting a few tenths of a second. Each burst emits an energy equivalent of up to 10 million Suns, and these episodes may recur years later.
-
- Magnetars can produce giant flares up to a million times more powerful still. The energy for this activity must come from superstrong magnetic fields so powerful that they apply higher stresses to the star’s crust. This could lead to burst-triggering “star quakes” that fracture the crust. Or, the magnetic field may become twisted, storing energy until it reconfigures to a different state and suddenly releases it. In all likelihood, both mechanisms are involved.
-
- Some recent discoveries now suggest magnetars may be closer to their rotation-powered cousins than originally thought. In 2009, Fermi observed magnetar-like bursts from a source named SGR 0418+5729, but X-ray studies show its magnetic field is no stronger than a typical pulsar’s.
-
- In 2011, NASA’s “Swift observatory” detected short X-ray bursts from SGR 1822–1606, but its magnetic field is almost as weak. Then, in July 2016, Fermi and Swift observed a dozen magnetar-like bursts from PSR J1119−6127, a source that previously behaved like a typical radio and gamma-ray pulsar despite its unusually strong magnetic field.
-
- Not all neutron stars are speed demons. 1E 161348–5055, the bright blue dot at the center of the supernova remnant RCW 103, takes 6.67 hours to rotate once. This is the slowest spin among the more than 2,600 known neutron stars in our galaxy.
-
- The high-energy radiation surrounding a typical neutron star would not make it an inviting vacation destination. But what would we find if we could protect ourselves from the hazards and travel into a neutron star? Our destination will be an isolated, 1.4-solar-mass, 12-mile-wide (20 km) pulsar just a few hundred years old.
-
- First, we traverse a hot ionized atmosphere just a few inches (10 centimeters) thick, possibly made of hydrogen, helium, or carbon. Next, we reach a 4 million F (2.2 million K) surface, a thin ocean populated by free electrons and the nuclei of iron-56 and lighter elements.
-
- After the first couple of yards of our descent, we reach the outer crust. As we go deeper, iron gives way to nuclei packed with more and more neutrons. Experiments at the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva show that the next elements will be nickel-62, the most tightly bound nucleus, followed by other nickel isotopes and then krypton-86.
-
- At a depth of about 110 yards (100 meters), the nuclei become organized into a regular crystalline structure immersed in a degenerate electron gas.
-
- Just before we hit the quarter-mile (400 m) mark, where the density is so high a thimbleful of matter would weigh 925,000 tons, we reach the inner crust. At this point, most neutrons leak out of nuclei and likely form a superfluid, a substance that keeps flowing with no loss of energy, plus protons and degenerate electrons.
-
- Nuclei condense into large spherical collections immersed in the neutron fluid like meatballs in sauce. Physicists suspect these spheres are crushed into unusual shapes over the next half-mile (800 m) or so, first rods resembling spaghetti and then plates resembling lasagna.
-
- Scientists refer to this state as nuclear pasta. At greater depth, the shapes get crushed into uniform nuclear matter much like the outer core. Holes form, filled with neutron superfluid, and shrink in size the deeper we go.
-
- At a depth of about 0.7 mile, we reach the outer core. It’s filled with neutron superfluid, degenerate electrons, protons in a superconducting state’ where electrical currents flow indefinitely with no resistance and muons, a heavyweight relative of electrons. In traditional neutron star models, this composition would extend all the way to the center, making up the entire core. But if the density rises above that of an atomic nucleus, where a thimble-sized volume weighs 900 million tons, an inner core will form about 3 miles down.
-
- The inner core may contain many types of exotic matter. They include “hyperons“, which are particles more massive than protons that contain at least one “strange quark“, condensed matter made of strange mesons, or quarks completely freed from the confines of the nuclear particles they construct.
-
- No one knows. But new astronomical data may soon provide nuclear physicists with the constraints they need to begin narrowing down these possibilities. In the meantime, neutron stars will continue their pulsing, accreting, bursting, and flaring behaviors to the unending fascination of astrophysicists.
-
------------------------------ Other Reviews about neutron stars:
-
- 1897 - The mysterious Neutron Stars, Pulsars, and Quasars create radio bursts of energy that astronomers are still trying to explain. There are mysterious radio bursts coming to us from far away galaxies. Since 2007 some 20 pulses have been recorded. The pulses only last for a few milliseconds, but, they release the energy equal to a million suns.
-
- 1327 - Neutron Stars - The surface is solid and harder that a diamond, 50 trillion times denser than solid lead. Its magnetic field is a trillion times more intense than that of our Sun.
-
- 1273 - Neutron Star - Are Astronomical Mergers in our Future? Mergers are going on all the time in our Universe. Some are large, some are relatively small. Our galaxy is relatively quiet right now. We should use this time to study what might happen when these mergers do occur?
-
- 1192 - The new zoo of Pulsars. When a star runs out of fuel it dies. When our star dies, the one we call our Sun, it will become a White Dwarf. When the central 10% of our Sun has no more hydrogen for fusion the core will shrink and the hydrogen fusion will move from the center to a shell surrounding a core of helium. This will happen about 5,000,000,000 years from now. When it happens the Sun will expand to many times its present size. The Sun will continue to get its energy from hydrogen fusion into helium until about 50% of the total mass is helium. Then, quite suddenly, it will switch to fusing helium into carbon and oxygen.
- 861 - Cannon Ball Star. Astronomers have discovered a Neutron Star shooting across the Milky Way Galaxy at 3,000,000 miles per hour. The star is traveling so fast it exceeds the escape velocity for the galaxy and will launch itself into intergalactic space. Astronomers are trying to find the cannon that could shoot this star into space with so much energy.
-
- 642 - Neutron Stars, Pulsars, and Magnetars.
-
- 625 - Neutron Stars. All stars, depending on their size, are destined to evolve into one of these three, :(1) White Dwarf (2) Neutron Star(3) Black Hole. The White Dwarf goes through a giant Red Dwarf stage before it collapses but it is not large enough to go supernova. The Neutron Star and Black Hole both evolve after a giant Supernova explosion.
-
- 21 - 381 - Stars grow old and become White Dwarfs, Neutron Stars, or Blackholes.
-
December 23, 2020 NEUTRON STARS 2950
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----- Comments appreciated and Pass it on to whomever is interested. ----
--- Some reviews are at: -------------- http://jdetrick.blogspot.com -----
-- email feedback, corrections, request for copies or Index of all reviews
--- to: ------ jamesdetrick@comcast.net ------ “Jim Detrick” -----------
--------------------- --- Thursday, December 24, 2020 ---------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment