Slashdot Mirror
Quark Stars
BigGar' writes "Astronomers seem to have discovered a new type of star. It would lie between a neutron star and and a black hole in the hierarchy of stars and consist of quark matter. Further observations with the Chandra X-ray telescope will be needed to confirm the results."
i still cant figure out why you think it would
admit defeat, live in decline, be the victim of our own design
I had read once that black holes could be regarded as super-large elementary particles (described by very few parameters: spin, charge, mass). Would "quarks stars" be something like that, or more like a huge Bose-Einstein condensate?
Jes curious....
I'm a bloodsucking fiend! Look at my outfit!
"Neutron stars are the vestiges of immense supernova explosions, collapsed stars with extremely compact cores, denser than all known objects except black holes. A teaspoonful of a neutron star would weigh one billion tons, as much as all the cars and trucks on Earth."
That would be one impressive teaspoon.
Tall, Blonde and Weaponized
tcd004
Does anyone know if all up quarks are the same as all other up quarks and if all down quarks are the same as all other down quarks? There might be a billion different slight variations of the two kinds. We don't have the equipment to define a quark past a certain level.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I guess Armin Shimmerman was pretty cool, but I don't think he's really a star... Or was that a different kind of Quark, that doesn't try selling self-sealing stembolts...
This stuff looks dense enough to be a black hole (black hole in the sense of "light can't get out", not necessarily "singularity"). So, what kind of densities do you need to get a blackhole, or does the total mass also enters the equation?
So why does Quark get a star type named after him.. Who'd he swindle that Deal from? :)
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
An All-Linux Think Tank
-----
Quark Sing-a-long Written by Lynda Williams
For Jefferson National Lab
Bring Our Daughters to Work Day.
(refrain)
Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top and Bottom!
The World is made up of Quarks and Leptons!
Up, Down, Charm, Strange,Top and Bottom!
Yum! Yum!
Quarks come in six flavors
They live in families of two.
Up Down, Charm Strange, Top and Bottom!
They come in anti-flavors too!
Each family makes a generation
between which is a mass gap.
The up quark is the lightest and the top quark
is the most fat!
The second and third generations
do not live for very long.
That's why everything in the Universe
is made up of Ups and Downs!
(refrain)
Quarks carry a color charge.
They come in red, green and blue.
You'll never see a quark all by itself
cuz they stick together with a strong force glue.
Quarks carry electric charge.
A fraction of electricity.
Quarks combine together so the total charge
is a multiple of unity!
An up, up down makes a proton for a total charge of plus one.
A down, up, down makes a DUD neutron!
Physics is so much YUM YUM PHUN!
(refrain)
copyright 1999 Lynda Williams
http://www.entersci.com/cosmic/quarkl.htm
One in a billion? Where did you get that from? Sounds like you're even more full of hot air than you are claiming these astrophysicists are.
It seems quite reasonable that they should be able to get an approximate age for the star. The size of the expanding cloud of debris around it, for one, should allow them to make a very good estimate. So I would imagine they used this, or some other method, to determine that the supernova happened about 800 years ago. So if they know the approximate age of the star, and what part of the sky it's in, and they know that it's close enough to the Earth that it's supernova would have been visible to everyone, and they know that there was one supernova witnessed by people on Earth at that time in that part of the sky, you still think the probability is 1 in a billion?
Arrr, it be the infamous pirate, No Beard Pete!
It's density, not mass, that stops light. A star may have more mass than a black hole, but the gravitational field is at no point strong enough to "stop light", as you put it. (Think Gauss's law---inside a sphere, the gravitational field is influenced only by the matter "under" you.)
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The study of subatomic particles enables us to manipulate matter more intelligently. This has the eventual possibilities of:
a) allowing us to harness the storied "zero-point energy," which, if possible, would make fusion seem like a stale fart.
b) cool ass shit like time travel.
c) stuff you and I both haven't thought of, because it's inconceivably cool.
While I think going to Mars would be pretty neat, what exactly would it accomplish? We already know there isn't any life there anymore. Going to Mars would be more of a "look what we can do, mom" than anything else.
visit the hwky website for a lyrical genius infusion.
Where do you come up with one in a billion? The supernova was observed by astronomers, and even in 1181 AD, they could easily have recorded the region of sky where the event occured. Now if you search the same region even 800 years later, you'll only find a very small number of objects that could possibly be the remnants of a supernova. I'd say that if you find a compact star right where some 800 year old account placed a suprenova, the odds of them being related are much, much higher than one in a billion.
It is possible to tie a particular supernova remnant (and this is the only way ultra-dense stellar remnants are created) to an event witnessed in the past; indeed this is often done. Supernovae occur so infrequently in our galaxy (one every 100 to 500 years or so) that it is often possible to do so. For instance, it is very well known that the Crab Nebula is the remnant of the supernova witnessed by Chinese astronomers in 1054 AD.
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I didn't want to leave this space blank.
Quarks tend to be "bound" into either mesons (a quark and an antiquark) or hadrons (three quarks or three antiquarks---protons and neutrons).
I suppose the interesting part here is the enormous energy required to overcome the forces that bind mesons/hadrons together.
Err... that is, if the article is talking about what I think it's talking about. It's 2 AM here, I should be thinking about de Broglie, Schrodinger and Bohr.
Bah. Time for a porn break.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I was just getting used to that, after the story on slashdot...
Well by that definition all stars would be quark stars. The difference is that the quarks in quark stars are not bound together to form neutrons or protons.
Quite an unusual state of matter indeed.
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I didn't want to leave this space blank.
Quark stars are a new and interesting idea, but quark matter in general is not a new idea. "Quark matter", more usually "quark plasma" or "quark-gluon plasma", is believed to be the dominant form of matter in the universe just following the big bang. There is also early evidence that it's been witnessed in some of the largest particle accelerators.
In normal matter quarks group together in sets of 3 to form protons and nuetrons. Rare particles, like pions, can be formed from pairs of quarks, but quarks never appear in isolation, for them it's always in groups of 2 or 3. In quark plasmas though there aren't any distinct groups of twos and threes. All the quarks are smushed into a single substance with arbitrarily large numbers of quarks.
One analogy is if atoms are built out of "solid" quarks (in the from of protons and nuetrons), then the quark plasma is like melting them so they all run together. Prior to this announcement the only time that quark plasmas were expected to appear was in the presence of extraordinarily high energies and temperatures.
We could predict that nuetrons stars should exist because the "nuetron degeneracy pressure" which makes them possible was well understood theoretically. The theory that governs quark interaction is known as quantum chromodynamics and is far more complicated. I'm not sure whether anyone knows how to apply it to massive collapsing stars, and it doesn't surprise me if no one ever tried. It will be interesting to see if the existing theory can be made to justify quark stars. If not, well that's when things really start to get exciting.
Anyways, they are just guessing at this point.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Not to mention your first through sixth grade teachers.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
One in a billion? Where did you get that from?
Don't you know that 62% of statistics are made up on the spot?
Or as Mr D. Vader would put it:
If you only new the power of the quark side...
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Ok, seriously, I'm not a physicist, but I did pay attention in High School/College, and I have to ask: Do we KNOW any of this stuff. Or is everything just one (educated) guess on top of another.
Yes, we've made some discoveries, and for the most part things can be explained with the current line of thinking in Physics (Newton, Einstein, etc), but that's the problem, things are only MOSTLY explained, and certain keys are missing.
Take Newton, we've got all sorts of formulas, rules, and experiements built upon the concept of gravity. Something which we cannot define, do not know how it is "made" nor where it comes from. Or perhaps think of the stars, do we KNOW that this star is 8 billion light-year away? Or are we just guessing based on some color-shifting theory that seems to work here on Earth, based on guesses about the total mass of the universe (that we can't find some large percentage of...)
What if we humans are all WAY WAY wrong? What if like the "flat-earthers" of centuries ago, we've justified our THEORY of the planets, stars, solar systems, and the universe based on a completely incorrect model just becuase researchers (or humans in general) don't like to admit they are wrong, or that they don't know something? Are there any radical thinkers left? someone perhaps not starting from Newton or Einstein's work and trying to move it forward, but someone with NO preconsceptions, NO ingrained ideas, and NO outside influences?
Actually, nevermind, even if a person like that did exist, he'd be labeled as a quack in the media, shunned and laughed at by acedemia and problably killed by a nervous government.
Just some random thoughts on a quiet night...
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes
I'll go to bed now..
And are you suggesting that the work being done in Astronomy/Cosmology in the U.S. is costing BILLIONS of dollars? C'mon, man, get a grip! And I firmly reject the idea that only "humans in space" can effectively explore and exploit worlds outside ours.
If we have learned anything from the last few decades, I think it's that technology is an extension of our senses into the universe outside of our bodies... so why do we have drag our frail monkey-bodies to Mars if we can get the raw data cheaper and more safely with instrumentation? So we can play golf there too?
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
Don't you know that 62% of statistics are made up on the spot?
Not trying to start a flamewar or anything, but I always heard it was...like...uuhhh... 74%
I know the following isn't exactly about the article, but I've wondered about this for a long time:
What would happen if you start dumping an huge amount of electrons in a black hole? As I understand it, the electrical force is far more powerful than the gravitational force. Therefor I wonder: what would happen if you create this huge negative pole? Would the black hole become unstable, would it eventually become impossible to add more electrons or something else (maybe the question is wrong altogether)? I anyone knows, I'd like to hear.
Actually, strange as this may seem, people all over the globe ARE involved in X-ray astronomy. Astronomical observation such as this can help guide and correct our knowledge of physics (and the universe as a whole), something that has the potential to do a lot more for humanity than scuttling around on Mars with a rover full of Murican flags (or getting lost en route - darned metric system!)
Just because you can't immediately see the practical use in one type of research, or even if the people involved can't, does not mean we should abandon it for flashier, more obviously practical things. If you only ask questions that you know the answer to, odds are you won't learn much.
I was about to hit submit, but I have to say as a closing line... a Mars rover would be freaking cool. =) Vroom!
Ok, so *you* can't see an *immediate* application of this science. Wow, that makes it worthless!
I bet research into silicon's semiconductor properties seemed an effort in futility in the early days. "It's not a conductor and it's not an insulator. What good is it?!"
Also, while I want to see a person on Mars, don't confuse it with real science. Sure, we'll find out a few more interesting things about Mars but it's exploration not cutting-edge science. Science isn't here for your entertainment.
The protons and electrons go through a reverse beta decay to form neutrons and neutrinos. Not all protons and electrons are consumed in this fashion which lets the following ideas progress, the outter shell of a neutron star is covered with a bunch of high energy electrons and protons exisiting in the crust of the neutron star can be in a super fluidic state making the neutron star a gigantic super conductor. Electrons being annhihilated on the surface release X-Rays which get funneled by the intend magnetic field of the super conducting protons into beams which create the effect we dub a pulsar.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I'm no professional physicist - but I thought I remembered hearing that a neutron star was held stable by the neutron degeneracy pressure counteracting the gravitational forces. Once there's enough mass so that gravity overcomes the degeneracy pressure, there are no more forces pushing particles apart so the whole thing collapses to a mathematical point (black hole.) I'm not really sure how this works either; from what I remember of quantum, degeneracy is more a law than a force - two fermions simply can't occupy the same space, so there's a limit to how dense they can become. In any case, does anyone have any further knowledge of what force might be keeping these denser-than-neutron stars from collapsing into black holes?
Here is a more in depth report from NPR's Wednesday broadcast of All Things Considered (in Real Audio format).
It wasn't mentioned in the Chandra release or the CNN spot, but RX J1856.5-3754 is apparently the closest known neutron star. The Chandra site states it's distance at ~400 lyr and the APOD site cites 180 lyr, practically in our back yard!(in cosmological distances anyway)
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
For the money it costs to send one human, we could send a dozen robotic probes. Let's not waste billions for someone's vanity, or for the entertainment of millions who have read too many science fiction stories.
Also, you've fallen prey to a terrible, terrible fallacy that afflicts even good astronomer: the dreaded Selection Effect. How do you think they "happened" to come across this odd object? Almost certainly, because they were already studying the nebula and remnant. In other words, it's not out of the many billions of stars that they chose. It was out of the much much smaller pool of SNRs.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I did pay attention in High School/College, and I have to ask: Do we KNOW any of this stuff.
... moreso given our propensity to ask and answer the Why? question even in circumstances where it should neither bn asked nor answered.
... knowledge that now gives me a pretty good idea when leading cosmologists might be typing with one hand.
Sure prevailing theories influence what we look for, the way we look for it (instrument design) and the questions we ask of our observations. But that does not mean that there might be no substance to the scientific concensus.
One thing that is blindingly obvious from any perusal of the last couple of centuries of human history is that the rise of the scientific method has provided a potent tool to tamper with the world with.
While I certainly don't claim any ability to turn off my knowledge of such theories when looking at the world, I do see them rendering many things sensible which without them would demand special explanation
The example I like best is the theory of plate tectonics which renders sensible a host of observations and phenomena, such as volcanos and earthquakes, and ultimately has been shown by increasingly accurate measurement to account for the observed relative movement of adjacent tectonic plates.
When it comes to data from distant galaxies or from the subatomic realm, my confidence relies on little more than simple extrapolation from what I can observe directly with my own senses through the clear breadth gained by using even simple telescopes and microscopes to there being no sign of discontinuity as the power of such instruments is scaled up.
Are there any radical thinkers left? someone perhaps not starting from Newton or Einstein's work and trying to move it forward, but someone with NO preconsceptions, NO ingrained ideas, and NO outside influences?
Without language, it is going to be worse than hard for anybody to think too deeply in these areas, so it doesn't make any more sense to try to set up such a straw man than to try to ascertain the cosmology of an elephant.
Yet it remains important to remind ourselves just how much evil has been perpetarated by those who believed they knew the authoritative truth.
So how far can we go in discarding preconceptions and looking again with an open mind? And might anybody actually do it if they could?
Here I can only go from personal experience, although an experience I suspect at least a few have shared. As an already mature adult, I reached a point where things clearly were not working the way I had long assumed they would, so I consciously put aside my preconceptions and tried to start from scratch to find out how the world really works.
Now I'm first to admit it is nigh on impossible to put every detail behind you, most especially not deep personal values, likes and dislikes, but at least for me it was possible to have a sincerely fresh look at how the world works.
And while I certainly didn't find something which would overturn the bulk of mainstream science, I did identify useful patterns that extend way beyond the then traditional scope of science
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
If they are the same, or even just similarly grouped, does that mean that physical existence is basically a binary system? I wouldn't be suprised, it's kinda everywhere: chinese philosophy (yin/yang, thing/no-thing), sex (male/female), life/death; I don't think it's any accident that binary worked out so well for computers.
c-hack.com |
If you lived 150 years ago, what would your idea of "communication technology" be like?
Without Planck trying to understand blackbodies, Quantum Mechanics might never have had the kick it needed, to get Bohr's ponderings into the structure of atoms. In 1900, most problems seemed nearly solved, except for two little "clouds on physics' sky" as noted by Kelvin. It turned out that these two clouds would lead to QM and relativity. And they had quite a lot to do with observations done in astronomy.
Without these ideas, there would be no semiconductors, there would be no computers. You wouldn't be posting to /. if it hadn't been for those looking into the most fundamental questions of their time.
Quarks, quark-gluon plasma are among the most fundamental questions of our time.
What would a manned mission to Mars give us? Well, some kewl tech, quite a lot of resources into research, and probably also a positive long-term effect following from the increased attention given to science.
But it is not likely to be of fundamental importance to our world-view. It is not likely to do anything to give us understanding that is going to be used in that kind of technology you can't even imagine today.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Bandwidth, latency, and computing power. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the best decision-making algorithms reside in the human brain. We respond to unexpected contingencies much better than any robot. We recognize (new) patterns and intuit new consequence faster and more accurately. (See, there is something we do well.)
Mars is around 8 light minutes away. If your probe happens into a dangerous situation, or even an unexpected one, it will take 16 minutes for a teleoperator to respond. That cannot be helped and cannot be controlled. Also, teleoperation requires a lot of data, but the data bit rate from deep space is generally pretty small. So you'd be waiting a long time, 16 minutes out of the loop, for a trickle of information. It's really no wnder we lose so many spacecraft.
As things stand today, a human presence is the most efficient way to conduct wide-ranging exploration.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Does anyone know enough about this topic to know if these stars aren't just transitionary critters, on their way to being black holes? Or do astronomers have good reason to believe this a distinctly different way for a star to end its life?
"I like to wear big boy pants."
Much could have -- and was! -- said about the original accelerators. Why spend all this money whipping protons around a ring? Why not do something "practical"? Say, like medical research. Cure diseases instead of peering at tiny particles.
Interestingly enough, much of what we know about microbiology can be traced back to synchrotron radiation labs. At Stanford, the "waste" photons generated by the synchrotron ring turned out to be useful in X-ray crystolography (I assume the same at other facilities). Now SSRL is so important it can compete with the physics experiments in control of beamtime on the accelerator. All from some "impractical" studies.
The nature of research -- frsutrating as you might find it -- is that you never know, ahead of time, what will be a dead end and what will be "practical". The history of the past few centuries indicates that basic research nearly always ends up enhancing "normal" life.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I don't know where the protons go, but the elections go down the drain.
The difference, of course, is the mass and possibly density of a neutron star compared to that of an actual neuron.
Its difficult to call a neutron star a collection of neutrons because in a normal neutron is composed of a (theoretically) fixed collection of quarks which "belong" to that neuron in some way; we have no such guarantee within a neuron star - in fact, its quite likely that all of the quarks composing a neutron star interact with each other in a way that is characteristic of the interactions of quarks within a single neutron.
We think of neutrons as little "balls" of quantum probability which exhibit matter properties, but what if we "melted" those balls so that the surface of an object composed of such balls looked more like the (macroscale) ocean than a McDonald's playground ballpit?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
we should always abandon the impractical for more obvious practical things ..
.. perhaps we should focus on developing Warp Drive technology first ..
.. we could go visit the nearest Neutron star.
maybe going to mars isn't the most practicle
then everything would be alot easier
But by the end of the decade there will be as many transistors in your wearable pc as there are nurons in the human brain. It seems fairly likely that robotic exploration devices will at this point out evolve the usefullness of human presence in space exploration.
Of course our consumer driven society will also have evolved by this point. We will demand that the robotic explorers are accompanied by human spiritural advisors and artists with oil paint and canvas.
"No Shit! is that the way its going to be?"
- "Er, no. there aint even going to be any robotic explorers. We can simulate them in VR space and sell just as much through the advertising - so why bother with the expense of going anywhere at all."
Mind you wouldnt it be cool if the first robot as smart as a person on mars was running open source software... wonder if Linus will mind adding in this 4 1/2 terabyte Artificial Intelligence Module to the Kernel. Anybody got some spare time over the next ten years?
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Physicians say they can't account for all the enrgy and mass that are beeing sucked into a black hole. As one of the elementary laws of physics is that the mass/energy of the universe is constant, this is a rather interesting remark.
It would mean that the remained of this energy goes off to somewhere else. Where? Noby knows.
But if this string theory implies that a black hole can memorize the structures of what is beeing drawn into it, that would make all that sci-fi black-hole/worm-hole multidimensional-travel things alot more real. At least in theory.
Because if mass and energy disappears it has to appear somewhere else. And the only way it can go somewhere else, is by using dimensions unkown to us.
I know this sounds spaced out beyond belief, but I like to keep my mind open for new things. If they're scientific enough :)
Could anyone actually knowing anything about string-theory comment this?
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Spooooooooooooooooooon!!!!!!
[c'mon, somebody *had* to say it.]
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
I don't know if this thing is a pulsar, and of course, it might not beam toward us.
Really? I thought pulsars "beamed" in all directions.
How does it pick which way to send?
And if this were the world imagined in 1950s science fiction, that would actually mean something. But actual researchers in the field of artificial intelligence long ago conceded that "number of neurons" is not a good figure of merit for intelligence. We have, at best, the barest beginnings of software that emulates the human capacity for pattern recognition; and nothing really even hints of human judgment. I think a field should at least exist before we pronounce it about to surpass human capabilities...
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Under current understanding, a pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star. Conservation of angular momentum, combined with the stately rotation of main sequence stars, imply that nuetron stars start off spinning really fast. Conservation of magnetic flux, combined with the noticeable magnetic field around main sequence stars, implies that neutron stars are born with extremely high magnetic fields.
Charged particles -- no one exactly knows the source, either from the surface or raining down from debris in orbit -- are accelerated to very high speeds by the magnetic field. When charges accelerate, they radiate. Since they are tied tightly to the strong field, they move along the field lines, and the radiation is strongly beamed along the flight path. We see that radiation primarily as radio waves, although pulsars have been found at all wavelengths.
Pulsars emit their radiation continually. However, because the star is spinning and the beam is narrow, it "sweeps" across the Earth once per revolution. So we see blips, not a continuous signal. The usual analogy is a lighthouse sweepings its light across the sea.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Well, i have to tell you, at 7AM, i'm a little groggy, and at first glance, i thought the headline for this article said Quick Star.
I thought, Now what? Advertisement for a pyramid scheme? Yesterday we had one for that zap station.
sig?
I did a PhD on pulars, which everyone thinks are neutron stars. At one point I found a paper which suggested that instead they might be "strange matter" stars - and it's always intrigued me how difficult it is to distinguish between the two.
The cool thing about finding strange matter stars is that it suggests there's a lower-energy state of matter than our normal up/down quark pairings. No one's really sure because QCD is so hard to get numbers out of.
Every time they build a new accelerator someone harps on this, worrying about whether we'll ram particles together hard enough to create a meta-stable bubble of strange matter. If there is a net saving in energy due to expanding that bubble (drop in energy due to increasing volume of lower-energy-state matter, increase in energy due to increased surface tension on the surface), the bubble will tend to expand and gobble up everything in its path - like the Earth, for example.
That's the common worry, though it's easily allayed by noting that particles with much higher energy than anything we could create in an accelerator are hitting our atmosphere all the time, and none of them have turned our planet into a jiggling mass of strange matter.
Anyway, interesting idea.
All opinions expressed herein are not my own; I haven't had free will since last year when aliens ate my brain.
It has to conserve not only ansular momentum but the original magnetic field of the star. As I understand it, the radiation that you see coming from the poles of a neutron star is due to magnetic reconnection and particles that find themselves free to leave the B-field. Since quarks are charged particles (and neutrons aren't) then I would suspect that any of the localized charged particles would either escape due to the lorentz force or accrete quickly.
But I could be wrong.
All known matter is made up of atoms in one of their four stages (solid, liquid, gas, and plasme). Each atom contains 3 known subparticles, neutrons, protons, and electrons. In turn neutrons and protons are each belevied to be made up of 3 quarks. There are no subparticles of electrons yet known.
It is safe to say that all known stars contain quarks, though they are part of stable atoms. But, what would happen if there were no electrons and whatever ethreal particles they're made of? There is reason to beleive that without electrons quarks would have no reason to form into the protons and nuetrons (though its quite controversial). Now, imagine you had entire stars that had no, or more likely, not enough electrons. It is possible that the rest of the matter, quarks not formed into protons/neutrons, may comprise the vast majority of such stars.
What impacts and/or uses this discovery have are not yet known, but it gives an insight into subatomic structure and how our universe may have formed. It also has some antimatter implications I won't get into. The most likely use comes from the fact that the bonds between quarks may be much stronger than the bonds between their big brothers.
Oh, and I'm a high school student with way too much spare time. I don't claim to be an expert on this, but I do know a bit. Their may be some misleading things in what I've stated above, and some of it may just be wrong or unlikely. Just a little disclaimer, for I'm no resource on the subject. If you're that interested, go learn more about it.
And you could build a lot of little robots that talked to each other. If one buys the farm doing something stupid, the others could learn. Bandwidth wouldn't be a problem if we improved comms infrastructure in the solar system (laser satellite repeaters?). Latency isn't much of an issue, really. We aren't in a rush to scoop dirt, are we? Take it easy mon, kick back at the console and wait for you dumb robot to get nervous and ask your advice...
If *I* was mission control, I'd MUCH rather have to deal with dead hardware than dead astronauts. Think Apollo 13. Think Challenger. Think every Mars mission that dissappeared without a trace.
Anyhow, the point is likely moot. There is simply NO way that remote exploration technology won't catch up with the vague and poorly-supported "plans" for a manned mission to Mars.
I say, if we want to start colonizing space, let's start closer to home.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
dunno, beats me... maybe you're not too clever or sumtink?
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
Oh my god physics has all changed, I gotta go back to school now....................
I'll just chime in here on the subject of stellar distances, based on my understanding as a (very) amateur astronomer (so if you know more than me, feel free to correct me wherever I make errors).
Stellar distances as calculated by astronomers are based on less "exotic" ideas than the doppler effect. For nearby stars (less than 500 light years away or so), we can use parallax. As the Earth goes from one side of its orbit to the other, we can measure how far one of these nearby stars moves relative to the background stars. Closer stars will appear to move more than more distant ones (the same way roadside objects appear to move much more quickly than a tree or mountain in the background). So unless there is some bizzare undiscovered property of physics that causes parallax to not work in space, we can be pretty sure we have accurate distances for these nearby stars.
Using that information, we can check our other measuring sticks used over longer distances. Main-sequence stars (normal stars such as our Sun and 90% of the stars in the sky) have a color which corresponds directly to their intrinsic brightness. The apparent brightness of a star (how bright it appears to us) is inversely proportional to its distance. So, knowing it's intrinsic brightness (based on color) and its apparent brightness (by looking at it), we can calculate its distance. We can calibrate this color->brightness function by examining nearby stars whose distance can be measured with parallax.
Also, there is a special class of stars called Chepheid variable stars who vary in brightness on a regular period. The length of that period is a function of the intrinsic brightness of the star. Knowing that, and the apparent brightness, we can calculate the distance. Again, we can calibrate our function of period->brightness based on parallax. These stars are all over the place, and we can use them to calculate the distance to galaxies out to a few hundred million light-years (to my understanding). Beyond that, it's not currently possible to pick out individual stars.
That does get far enough out so that doppler shifting becomes measureable, and we can check our doppler->distance function against Chepeid distances.
... "Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the w
Isn't Quark that sour milk stuff similar to lumpy yoghurt? :)
I guess if you believe the moon is made out of cheese, it only follows that stars can be made out of quark
Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
For those of you with the stomach for it, here's the preprint.
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
"Neutron stars are the vestiges of immense supernova explosions, collapsed stars with extremely compact cores, denser than all known objects except black holes. A teaspoonful of a neutron star would weigh one billion tons, as much as all the cars and trucks on Earth." Does that include the weight of the teaspoon or not?
From a philosophical perspective, sending people to Mars probably would change our long-term philosophies, if not so much our every day philosophies of life. Sending people to Mars is part of acclimating the human race to the idea that Earth may not be here forever and we have to make preparations for expanding our eggs to the next basket. No, not everyone has the luxury to consider, plan, and fund these matters that will never change. However, it is still something that needs to be done if we want to be around longer than another millennium or so.
$0.02USD
-l
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I am one of the authors of a competing paper on RX J1856 that was published yesterday, as well as a co-discoverer of the pulsar in 3C58. In my opinion these results, while definitely a possibility are certainly very preliminary. And in fact, there are other possibilities that make quite a bit more sense.
In the case of RX J1856, there is a ~15% chance that the lack of pulsations (one of the biggest reasons for suspecting a quark star) is simply the result of an unfortunate emitting geometry or viewing alignment. Given that there are ~7 objects known that are similar to RX J1856, having at least one of them in this 15% seems quite likely to me -- and avoids having to invoke a new form of "star stuff".
As for 3C58, the neutron star cooling problem can be mitigated (but not completely removed) by assuming a larger age for the supernova remnant (and therefore the neutron star) -- which expansion measurements and pulsar timing measurements also suggest.
In other words, there are simpler explanations for the facts. Although those explanations certainly wouldn't get as much press...
ein Sandwich mit Quark und Schnittlauch oben drauf bitte.*
Quark is the german word for a diary product somewhere between cottage cheese and yoghurt.
Why does this myth keep coming up?
Educated people have known that the earth was round since antiquity. They weren't dumb and there was plenty of evidence - lunar eclipses, ships disappearing over the horizon, etc. They even had a relatively good estimate of the size of the earth.
In fact, that's why Columbus had a hard time finding a backer for his journey. Everyone knew the approximate size of the earth. Columbus, the bozo, had the numbers wrong. He avoided disaster only because of incredible luck in hitting an unanticipated continent. Think of how different history would be North America were further west, if the Atlantic was the large ocean.
The guy with no formal education and who never traveled more than a dozen miles from the place of his birth might have thought the earth was flat, but more likely he never thought about the shape of the earth at all. But he was no more the final word on "what people believed" than the trailer trash watching Jerry Springer is of our society.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
check out this link in the NY times as well:h tml
www.nytimes.com/2002/04/11/science/11QUAR.
Sigh. My id isn't prime. 2 2 2 2 2 3 5 313
Oh I know the answer to this: Armin Shimmerman!
*Happy he finally got to use DS9 trivia on Slashdot*
"Derp de derp."
Trying to understand why we have some neturon stars and some quark stars. You'd have sufficient density/gravity/heat to overcome the nuclear force binding the neutrons together then they'd decay into quark stars, then as they take on more matter, they'd form black holes?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Very Interesting Times INDEED!
Our understanding of QUARKS alone is limited. Macroscopic quark objects.. it's a new state of matter fer gods sake! Who knows what this stuff can do! I wonder if this is a transitory state for the remnant.. maybe it undergoes a phase change into a black hole later in it's lifecycle. Anyone know how stable a Quark Plasma is?
From the article in the paper, they were saying that neutron stars are made up of neutrons and collections of quarks in groups of 3 (they call them bags of quarks I believe).
The new star they found has these quarks but they are not in groups of 3, they are just single quarks.
They were also mentioning that it may help to understand dark matter and such, im pretty clueless when it comes to this stuff but i find it very interesting to read about.. so sorry if my info above is not accurate =).
Even if this theory does not turn out to be true, I'm sure there are speculative fiction writers out there who are using "Quark Stars" and "Quark Matter" as a plot device in their next story.
Anyone want to take bets to see if this term shows up in next year's season of Enterprise or Farscape?
They "beam" from the magnetic poles, which is usually not aligned with the rotational axis, so the beam sweeps around the axis. It's only when the beam's path crosses earth that we can see a pulsar. The "pulses" of a pulsar are the beam sweeping across the earth as it rotates.
Plus strange quark matter is one of the few things you can point to and say what exactly it would be useful for. Aside from all its interesting properties, it might be a source of exothermic reactions. Shoot neutrons at it, get heat out.
Also, if strange quark matter exists, we now know that the ground state of the universe is not the one we live in, but rather the strange quark matter state.
In related news, a group of scientists working at the University of Whoople have discovered a collapsed star composed entirely of magnetic monopoles.
Their data is soon to be published in the Journal of Irreproducable Results.
For the record, I have a mental retardation to where I can not understand spoken language well. This also affects my ability to compose speech and prose in a manor to which it appears to be above the US average for adults. I could give you a more detailed reason why, but I doubt it interests you. No, I was not dropped on my head, trolls. No, I was not fed poison.
I can temporarily circumvent this problem by concentrating harder on the task. However, this causes my mental capabilities to tire faster than normal. Because of this, I do not dedicate such resources to the matter unless I feel it necessary to do so.
I usually do not bother as I find the english language extremely inadiquate and inacurate anyway. The best one can expect after conveying an idea to another is that they at least have an aproximation of it. I do not see the point of wasting my time in this endevor in informal communication because it reaks of arrogance, blind social conformity, and a crippling of the entire point of the existance of the language to begin with, communication. One favors security, rules, and regulations over freedom of expression.
Have a double-good day.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Second, I can not recall a specific name for this condition. I shall try and explain what happens the best I can. The right side of my brain, usually associated with artistic thought, dominantly handles my sences. Basically, I sence things like I am left handed. I am not left handed however, the left side of my brain is the dominant controler of my moter skills making me right handed. This causes problems because I do not sence things the same way most people do, I may find some obsure meaning from a situation where just about everyone else picks up on the logical meaning right away. On the other side of the coin, when I try to express myself, I have trouble expressing the parts of my ideas that "paint the picture." For the record now, up until this point I have been writing for about 25 minutes. As stated in the previous post, I can overcome some of this by concentrating harder. But, it has a tendancy to burn me out quicker mentally.
In addition, although not disabilities, I have Dysthymic Disorder [basically long term (~10 years) mild depression] and Avoidant Personality Disorder (I do not like being with groups of people, but am not hostile towards them.) These are my souvenirs from America's wonderful public educational system.
Thanks for taking an interest.
40 minutes
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
You're not drugs! You're PEOPLE! Anonymous coward is PEOPLE! ANONYMOUS COWARD IS PEOPLE!!!!
That's about to get solved.
Dunno about that one. Perhaps you would. There are some resources we might run out of, yes.
"Can you imagine something like tuberculosis, only worse?" You would understand very well what it was about.
You know, there are things that may be done with this planet, so that we won't have to leave in the nearest future.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid