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Astronomers Find Brightest Pulsar Ever Observed
An anonymous reader writes: Astronomers using the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the NuSTAR satellite have discovered a pulsar so bright that it challenges how scientists think pulsars work. While observing galaxy M82 in hopes of spotting supernovae, the researchers found an unexpected source of X-rays very close to the galaxy's core. It was near another source, thought to be a black hole. But the new one was pulsing, which black holes don't do. The trouble is that according to known pulsar models, it's about 100 times brighter than the calculated limits to its luminosity (abstract). Researchers used a different method to figure out its mass, and the gap shrank, but it's still too bright to fit their theories.
Maybe they have stumbled upon some new type of star or object. There are probably all kinds of large things that we have never run across before.
If you know you don't know shit about it ... WTF is the point of throwing out stupid theories which aren't based on anything?
Somebody didn't RTFA.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
The obvious reason for such a beam is some alien kid playing with his xray toy pointer.
That, or possibly theoretical models that put 95% of stuff into not yet observed dark matter/dark energy are still a bit immature.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
"Look at that star! It's so bright, like it's pointed straight at us! That can't be ri--"
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
This is one of the areas I think the electric universe guys are correct about.
http://www.thunderbolts.info/t...
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Perhaps because the people who find them interesting are smart enough not to comment? I mean, you come out and talk about politics and frankly, the people who do it professionally are hardly experts compared to the common man the way astronomers and astrophysicists are.
I mean, I have only read a couple of articles and bullshit on here about red light cameras. I suspect the average professional politicians know only a scant amount more about them than I do, if anything the main "gap" in my knwoledge is the names and faces of the people who peddle them.
The gap between the average idiot and the politician is a hares breath compared to that between even an above average idiot and an astrophysicist on the subject of astrophysics.
Even now, shit, I eat stuff like this up. This is a cool finding.....but....fuck if I don't have anything to add, so I comment on the comment about comments, because that....I am much closer to an expert on :)
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I believe the point is that they made the math to match the observations. If their assumptions are incorrect, then the math they made up will be based on those false assumptions, like current cannot exist in space. Which does not make sense to me since we obviously have the northern lights being created by current flow from the sun. And now we know about the magnetic tubes that form every 15 minutes that connect from the sun to the earth. Perhaps the assumptions made decades ago need to be revisited.
Now I will admit that some of the extents they go to on that site go too far and seem too much of a stretch. Everything gets put into being evidence of the electric universe even when there are simpler explanations. But the basic idea of current flow at massive scales may have some merit.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
I don't find their hypothesis very persuasive. They don't go into any details. How exactly is this mechanism supposed to work? How high luminosities should be expected? What limits on pulse rates does their model predict? How is the energy generated? How large are pulsars? If they aren't compact objects, why do we have pairs of them that are separated by half the diameter of the sun?
If the standard model of pulsars were held to the same stnadard of handwaviness, one wouldn't even have discovered that there might be a problem with a too high luminosity for this pulsar. You only discover that sort of problems once you actually get down to it and calculate the consequences of your model. Examples of predictions made by the neutron star model of pulsars is: Pulsars should have quite well-defined maximum and minimum masses, and maximum and minimum sizes and surface gravities. They can't be too light, or they wouldn't collapse to form neutron stars, they would be white dwarves instead. And they can't be too heavy, or they would collapse to form black holes. These upper and lower bounds are called the Chandrasekhar limit (1.4 solar masses) and Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit (about 3 solar masses). If the neutron star is to stay together it can't rotate so fast that the centrifugal force wins over gravity. This, together with the limits on surface gravity and diameter implies a maximum rotation frequency. All pulsars we have seen so far fit with these limits.
The reason why a too high luminosity is considered problematic is that the energy source of ultraluminous pulsars is belived to be accretion: Matter falling down towards the surface of the neutron star, and converting lots of potential energy into kinetic energy and then heat radiation as it does so. But if too much radiation is emitted, this radiation exerts a pressure on the infalling matter that is so great that it pushes the matter back out. So if the pulsar (or any other thing driven by accretion) gets too bright, it ends up starving itself, and can't stay brighter than the point where radiation exactly cancels gravity for very long. That limit is called the Eddington limit, and the problem in this case is that the pulsar is 100 times brighter than this limit.
You can get around the Eddington limit by allowing for an asymmetric infall: More matter falling from some directions than other directions (example: a meteor hitting the earth is asymmetric accretion). But it's hard to go all the way up to 100 times the Eddington limit with realistic accretion scenarios. So this really is an interesting object.
But my point is that the Electric Universe guys don't do anything to explain the power source of the pulsar. If one assumes that it is powered by accretion as in the standard model, then they have exactly the same problem as the standard model. And if it isn't powered by accretion, where does it get its energy from? The article you link to talks about emission mechanisms, but not where the energy comes from in the first place. Also, the link they give to the press release is about a variant on the standard neutron star picture - it does not support the Electric Pulsar hypothesis.
I can't even find any references of "Red Shift" being discredited except by fringe crazies. I have found articles talking about a certain amount of uncertainty that may need to be adjusted based on our findings of space expansion, but nothing that says it's "wrong".
When an object collapses to a black hole, its gravity doesn't get any stronger. If you replaced the Sun with a black hole of the same mass, the Earth would continue in the same orbit, and light would behave quite normally in the solar system. The only place where strange stuff happens is when you get very close to the black hole (a few km away from its center in the case of one with the mass of the sun).
Still, let's assume that a star has somehow ended up really close to a black hole. First of all, if the star is so close that it experiences the kind of extreme gravitational lensing you describe, if would be so close that the black hole would be inside the star. Black hole radii are typically a few kilometers, and the heavily distorted regions are a few times that. Star radii are millions of kilometers.
But let's assume that the star is really compact, so you can have it close enough to the black hole to be interesting without actually touching it. In that case, you can get one of the beams you want, but not both of them. The easy one to get it the one that goes from the start, past the black hole and then towards us. That one gets stronger when the star is at moderate distances. The beaming in the other direction requires the star to be super-close to the black hole - so close that it couldn't be in a stable orbit.
So the best version of this model would have a tiny, bright star in an orbit around a black hole, being periodically magnified by the lensing of the black hole as it passes behind it (seen from us). It wouldn't really look like a pulsar, though.
love. it. one hundred times brighter seems pretty bright but i bet i could hold the pulsar directly up to my eye and still be pretty much somewhat possibly okay for the most part. perhaps.
It is what it is.
Think about the way the moon causes the liquid part of the earth to stretch in the directions both exactly toward the moon and exactly away from it.
Nothing's stretching away. In order of distance from the Moon we have:
1) nearside oceans
2) the Earth itself
3) farside oceans
All of them are attracted towards the Moon, but at decreasing strength due to distance. The nearside ocean gets pulled closer to the Moon than the Earth does, and the Earth gets pulled closer to the Moon than the farside ocean does. Hence, two bulges, but not because the far one is being pushed away from the Moon.
However, you've got that other star circling around the black hole - stretching it into an oval shape.
When you say "it," do you mean the star or the black hole? It seems like you mean the black hole...
A black hole isn't a physical object. It's a surface around an object at which the gravitational field strength has a particular value. I'm not sure it would be influenced in such a way by the presence of another object.
then perhaps the distortion of the gravity field is sufficient such that it allows the light to escape
What light are you talking about?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I expect it's instrument error. This is becoming a regular thing: (1) Make measurement, (2) form hypothesis, (3) send to marketing department, (4) great new discovery reported in the media, (5) discover error in calculation/instrument calibration/methodology, (6) secure tenure, (7) retract previously hyped assertion, (8) go to (1).
The gap between the average idiot and the politician is a hares breath...
That'd be a "hair's breadth," as in the diameter of a hair. I don't think rabbit exhalations have anything to do with it.
Carry on.
If you look at Audible website you'll see there are a few dozen books on astronomy and over 100 on "gender theory". I still think astronomy is much more interesting than gender theory.
Why wouldn't it be influenced? Think about a binary star system. Replace one of the stars with a black hole and nothing is really different. I'm not sure how you could say that it wouldn't be influenced by the presence of another object...
The light - well the light that would otherwise be emitted if the star weren't of sufficient mass to have it's event horizon be outside of it's physical outer boundary. The "it" that I referred to in "stretching it into an oval shape" is really the event horizon of the black hole.
I'm one of those that doesn't believe in the singularity aspect of a black hole. I think a black hole is just a star that has sufficient mass and density such that it's event horizon is beyond it's exterior. I don't think anything magical happens inside, I think it's just a regular star, or a neutron star. Even there were a singularity, my idea about pulsars isn't really any different.
The idea is simply that, the gravity field of a single star, black hole, or planet if it has no neighbors is spherical. If it's in a tight orbit with another body, as is with a binary star system, then it's gravitational field could be considered elliptical (if you imagine removing the other body - like take the moon out of the picture and just think about the earth's gravity field - it would be eliptical). I'm making the jump that the event horizon of a black hole in a binary system would also be elliptical. If that gravity field IS elliptical, then it's possible that radiation (I called it light) could escape at the edges.
Arp's discordant redshifts were dead in 1975 when it was realized a uniform distribution of galaxies in a volume created the 1/z distribution of angular separation. Arp and supporters always ignored this. Details described in Discordant Redshifts: A Post-Mortem. Support among professionals has been rapidly dying off, in every sense of the expression, leaving mostly nothing but 'fanboys'.
One of Electric Universe claims greatest problem is where the power comes from to drive the claimed currents (see Challenges for Electric Universe 'Theorists'...).
In theory, you're right. But my idea is that the event horizon (which is related directly on the gravity of the body within) is NOT necessarily spherical, but instead is elliptical due to the gravity of the second body. As you say you've witnessed this, I would imagine that in a lot of cases, the black hole is sufficiently massive - or the binary twin is not massive enough - to warp the event horizon to the point that light could escape. I'm talking about special cases, where the opposite is true... Either the black hole is not so far away from not being a black hole (I mean, in terms of mass), and/or the orbiting body is massive enough to have the effect of warping that event horizon to the point that it's below the body's surface. (or the gravity is weak enough to allow light to escape - you could think about this in terms of the event horizon or the gravity of the body. Keep thinking about it... I swear it makes sense when you get the right frame of mind.
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/51/hares-breath/
Yah I know, I just knew that would raise the hares on the back of somebodies neck :)
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I believe the point is that they made the math to match the observations.
Maths that accurately describes the physical world is DISCOVERED not "made up". Seriously, read a fucking text book and immunise yourself against that populist nonsense.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Do not look at pulsar with remaining good eye.
And how many examples of that happening in physics and astronomy do you have? Especially considering it takes a lot more than a single PR piece to get tenure these days, and while competing projects are looking for the chance to publish errors or check observations (especially in astronomy).
I hope so, because you do NOT want to smell a turtle-fart. And if it's turtles all the way down, that's a lot of fart.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
The idea is simply that, the gravity field of a single star, black hole, or planet if it has no neighbors is spherical. If it's in a tight orbit with another body, as is with a binary star system, then it's gravitational field could be considered elliptical
I'm not clear on why this should be the case. Can you really push and pull gravity around like it's a physical object?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
That is some of the most asinine shit I have heard. You seem to not understand the difference between "made to match" and "made up". Try learning to read what people write sometime.
From your statement then the Copernican heliocentric math would have been discovered and so it must accurately describe the physical universe. Jeeze, what a dumb-ass!
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Sort of... If two massive bodies were orbiting each other, if you were standing on one of them - if you were directly underneath the other body, you would be lighter. If you were directly perpendicular to the other body, you would be heavier.
My hunch is that opposing gravitational forces don't add up in that way when you're talking about forces so strong that light is too slow to escape them, or that for another object to influence the gravity of the black hole that much, it would itself have to be either so close as to be within the event horizon, or so dense as to have an event horizon of its own which overlaps the first.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The star is powered externally by currents in the cosmic plasma.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.