Ejection From Fastest Known Revolving Neutron Star

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)."

Comments

depression

[snyrt]

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.

Neutron Stars - Pulsars

[Kotetsu]

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
Parkes
Arecibo

The obvious solution.

[Christopher Thomas]

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.

[bcrowell]

Here is a link to the author's home page. You can download his papers there.

Here 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 nifty page about neutron stars, there could even be all kinds of exotic stuff inside them, like strange-quark matter.

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Extended explosion=Extended range?

[coryboehne]

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?