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Ghostly Ring Found Circling Dead Star
Roland Piquepaille writes "An international team of scientists has found a strange ring around a dead star by using images taken by NASA's Spitzer space telescope. This star, called SGR 1900+14, belongs to a class of objects known as magnetars. According to NASA, a magnetar is 'a highly magnetized neutron star and the remnant of a brilliant supernova explosion signaling the death throes of a massive star.' So far, about a dozen magnetars have been found. An amazing thing about these stellar objects is their magnetic field. One of the researchers said that 'magnetars possess magnetic fields a million billion times stronger than the magnetic field of the Earth.'
Well, that depends... iirc, a billion in the UK is not the same thing as a billion here. A billion here is 10^9, whereas if memory serves me correctly a billion in the UK is a million million, or 10^12. Personally I wish that they would just use scientific notation with numbers over a million, so that we'd really know what sort of order of magnitude we're talking about here. The difference between the US and UK systems just gets worse as the magnitudes get larger.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The state you are in while your HEAD is detached... - wait, what?
I was just about to make a remark about you being an insensitive clod ;-), but please note that billion being 10^12 is not an "older value" in certain countries. Actually, their list is much longer.
Oh yes, I am aware than on an English-speaking (-writing ?) web site, one has to expect (= billion (expt 10 9)). On the other hand, I have noticed that for many of us Nonenglishmen and Nonamericans, it is simply still often an issue of our subconsciousness that we calculate with long scale numbers without realizing at first. Therefore refraining from using words like "million billion" and using "10^15" instead might actually be a good idea, especially in case of scientific topics. :-)
Ezekiel 23:20
No, only Nine Lords are doomed to die. But it would be interesting to know why Sauron and Melkor are messing around with a magnetar.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)