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Resolving Beachballs in the Crab Nebula

Posted by timothy on from the only-the-really-active-beachballs dept.

Stranger4U writes "Researchers at New Mexico Tech and the NRAO have used the Aricebo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and some specilized equipment to more closely examine the pulses from the Crab Nebula pulsar. Some of the signals lasted less than two nanoseconds, meaning the originated from a volume no bigger than beach ball. Stories are here(1) and here(2)."

4 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Coolness Matters! ! by FFtrDale · · Score: 5, Insightful
    In Story (1), Romani says,
    "but if the 'coolness' of seeing ultra-bright beachball-sized plasma clouds thousands of light years away captures some young person's imagination and encourages them in technical pursuits, that's a good day's work."
    How many of us spent years studying difficult topics in technical fields and learned how to do things because of the "coolness" of some things that we saw as children? I'm guessing that there are a lot of us for whom that was a big motivation for sticking with it when things got hard.

    --
    Think, write, think, edit, think...then post.
    1. Re:Coolness Matters! ! by idlethought · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Perhaps it's the implication that there's still cool stuff to discover, rather than the idea that all the stuff worth discovering has is already available found. I was born after the moon landing. Although I know that it was more important than the Columbia's first space flight, it was seeing the space shuttle land for the first time that made me really feel that space flight was cool. Well, that and Star Wars.

  2. I thought... by Wes+Janson · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That something so small and so massive would have gone ahead and collapsed into a black hole. Were there multiple beachballs per supernova?

  3. doesn't seem very conclusive by g4dget · · Score: 3, Insightful
    First of all, it is only "nearly imperceptible subpulses" that are 2ns short, so we are not talking about the entire energy output of the pulsar.

    But just as importantly, all that this seems to tell you is that the region from which these subpulses come is less than 2ft thick along the line from here to there, it tells you much less about its area. So, perhaps this is just the signal you see when looking straight at the neutron star and something happens on a surface pacth. The patch could have a much larger diameter than 2ft.