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.'

Comments

Re:The ring

[dfm3]

Do not RTFA! For the love of God DO NOT RTFA! I wouldn't be so worried about that. This is Slashdot, after all...

Re:Pssst!

[pablomme]

Only if by "all over the world" you mean English-speaking countries and Brazil. Citing Wikipedia,

Most countries and languages in the world use the traditional long scale somewhat in contrast with your statement.

Re:Pssst!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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. :-)