Slashdot Mirror
Dead Star Set to Escape the Milky Way
slackah wrote to mention a NewScientist.com article discussing a fast-moving stellar corpse on its way out of our galaxy. From the article: "The object, called B1508+55, is a rotating neutron star, or pulsar. It is the superdense core of a massive star that exploded as a supernova about 2.5 million years ago. The explosion seems to have ejected the pulsar with such force that it will eventually escape the Milky Way entirely, says team member Shami Chatterjee, an astronomer with NRAO and CfA."
This kind of thing makes me wonder how static the current shape of our galaxy is. Do stars (dead or otherwise) leave all the time, and do they ever come in from somewhere else? Do ejected stars form the cores of new galaxies? I doubt we'll ever get a chance to see much of this in action anyway since the galaxy in general moves so slowly, but it's still neat.
:)
It also occurs to me that this isn't really news: depending on how far away the star is/was, there's a fair chance that it left our galaxy millions of years ago
Ok, the article didn't say anything about when it will leave the milky way. It just said that B1508+55 was going to leave the milky way, and that it had been traveling for 2.5million years from its point of origin in Cygnus. That translates to a velocity of 1100km/s or being able to cross 1/3 of the night sky from the time of birth to the present.
There are two things that excite me about this. 1) B1508+55 is a massive radio emitting object which is boldly going into the intergalactic space where all that putative dark matter is supposed to be. If its path bends we might end up discovering a "dark galaxy". Of course someone with access to human astronomy records must be around to observe this when it happens.
2) Cygnus spits out a lot of these objects. Maybe if we get a very much faster one, we can have a more convenient probe.
Strange how one can be so impressed by something, he knows so little about...
The concept of escaping the galaxy is awsome, but it would be nice to know more about it...
So I did some research: Milky Way Galaxy is: ~100,000 light years in diameter; ~3,000 light years in thickness; ~250,000 light years in circumference.
Basically, its huge. The ratio of our solar system to the milky way galaxy is 1:65,000,000.
From this I believe that just about anything can escape the galaxy, it would just take an extremely long time. However, as I have stated, my knowledge on the subject is limited, so it is possible that the planets and stars are arranged in such a way, that the gravitational pull would always redirct any object to go back. (i.e.: meteors and asteroids pass Earth in patterns and intervals, without leaving the galaxy).
The subject is very interesting, and if someone could bring more light on it, it would be helpful...
7700 years, anyway, according to the article.
But it's never a good idea to take these announcements at face value. It's far from clear the thing has anything to do with a supernova, or that it's a neutron star at all -- presuming any of them exist at all. What we do know is that its light (radio, x-rays, etc.) pulses at a rate too fast for them to understand unless it's a tiny thing spinning.
The reason they insist it has to be something spinning is that they have studied almost no plasma fluid dynamics, so they can't understand something blasting out radio, light, and x-rays that doesn't have a star in the middle of it. They don't understand fluid instabilities and current oscillations, so they're at a complete loss to understand the (quite common) sudden, often temporary changes in oscillation rate in pulsars.
What little they have studied, typically, is a trivial approximation to plasma fluid dynamics known as "magneto- hydro-dynamics" (MHD) which assumes space is superconducting and magnetic fields can't change distribution or strength. (They talk in all earnestness of magnetic fields "frozen" in place -- even in the sun!) Therefore, they can't understand how large flows of charged particles -- currents, which they insist on calling "jets" -- produce their own magnetic fields and flow along them, or how these flows' fields can interact in marvelously complex ways.
Everything you read about "dark matter", "supermassive black holes", and "neutron stars" amounts to a desperate attempt to find some way to make the extremely weak and purely attractional gravity account for the complicated things they see. The mathematics behind plasma fluid dynamics is too hard for them, and they just can't stand that. It makes their press releases funny to read, but it's sad, too. (Think of the lives wasted on planetary epicycles.)