A Shocking Space Movie

MagnetarJones writes "Multiple observations made over several months with the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope captured the spectacle of matter and antimatter propelled to nearly the speed of light by the Crab pulsar, a rapidly rotating neutron star the size of Manhattan. "Through this movie, the Crab Nebula has come to life," says Jeff Hester of Arizona State University."

Comments

More information about the anti-matter?

[jerde]

So in typical Slashdot fashion, they talk about the stream of anti-matter.

It's only mentioned briefly in the actual article as well:

"The jet looks like steam from a high-pressure boiler," said David Burrows of Penn State, another coauthor of the paper, "except when you realize you are looking at a stream of matter and anti-matter electrons moving at half the speed of light!"

So how do they know that one of these streams is made up of anti-electrons?

Ira Flatow is having a conversation about anti-matter on Science Friday as I'm typing this. It's a fascinating topic, so I always hate to see it just glossed over in press releases like this.

- Peter

Not very compact files

[Tablizer]

They did a poor job of packaging those moving images IMO.

There appear to be only about half a dozen frames to each one. It does not take near 1+ meg to make an AVI or MPEG that has only 6 frames. Granted, they gave a "zoom" view and repeated it enough times to make movement clear, but this is not worth long download times for us poor modem users.

They could have made some nice animated GIF's even with so few frames. Animated GIFs will do the repetition without having to store copies of the repeated frames. IOW, by-reference loops. I bet a roughly 300x300 pixel animated GIF would only take up about 100 to 400 meg for the same quality, since the colors tend to be monochromatic in those. (If they had a lot of colors, then GIF palletes tend to get ugly.)