The rotation curve for an asteroid is often determined by measuring the change in brightness of an asteroid over time. Plotting the light detected versus time yields a somewhat sinusoidal curve, which is usually interpreted to be due to the rotation period of a non-spherical asteroid. If binary NEAs are common, then what some of these light curves may actually be showing is the orbital period of the binary system (if they are synchronous this will be the same thing as the rotation period of the smaller component). This could mean a new interpretation of what may be behind some of these light curves.
As a further comment, the existence of double impact craters is not necessarily suggestive of binary asteroid systems -- an asteroid is more likely to break apart when it actually enters the Earth's atmosphere than in more distant encounters, so it's probably not good to assume that the system had already broken up and become a binary during a previous encounter.
I did a project on neutron stars for a stellar interiors course several years ago. I read a contribution by Gordon Baym titled "The High Density Interiors of Neutron Stars" in/Neutron Stars: Theory and Observation/. He stated that if temperature or density is sufficiently high in the core of a neutron star, the quarks constituting the neutrons will lose their association with specific neutrons. The density for this to occur is on the order of predicted neutron star central densities, so this was certainly never thought out of the question. He also mentioned that the conversion of up and down quarks to strange quarks could set of a chain reaction leading the neutron star to become a "strange star." The only problem I had with this was that it was never clear to me how the conservation law of strangeness was obeyed in this case. Does anyone have an explanation for this?
These things are up to 4 cm long and we just discovered them! These things are hardly microscopic. Who knows -- maybe there are mastodons living in rock crevices somewhere, and we're too moronic to find them.
On the plus side, I wonder if these things might make good pets, cleaning up all those icky spiders in our houses . . . but do they bite!? Maybe it's a good thing these things don't live all over the face of the Earth.
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The rotation curve for an asteroid is often determined by measuring the change in brightness of an asteroid over time. Plotting the light detected versus time yields a somewhat sinusoidal curve, which is usually interpreted to be due to the rotation period of a non-spherical asteroid. If binary NEAs are common, then what some of these light curves may actually be showing is the orbital period of the binary system (if they are synchronous this will be the same thing as the rotation period of the smaller component). This could mean a new interpretation of what may be behind some of these light curves.
As a further comment, the existence of double impact craters is not necessarily suggestive of binary asteroid systems -- an asteroid is more likely to break apart when it actually enters the Earth's atmosphere than in more distant encounters, so it's probably not good to assume that the system had already broken up and become a binary during a previous encounter.
I did a project on neutron stars for a stellar interiors course several years ago. I read a contribution by Gordon Baym titled "The High Density Interiors of Neutron Stars" in /Neutron Stars: Theory and Observation/. He stated that if temperature or density is sufficiently high in the core of a neutron star, the quarks constituting the neutrons will lose their association with specific neutrons. The density for this to occur is on the order of predicted neutron star central densities, so this was certainly never thought out of the question. He also mentioned that the conversion of up and down quarks to strange quarks could set of a chain reaction leading the neutron star to become a "strange star." The only problem I had with this was that it was never clear to me how the conservation law of strangeness was obeyed in this case. Does anyone have an explanation for this?
These things are up to 4 cm long and we just discovered them! These things are hardly microscopic. Who knows -- maybe there are mastodons living in rock crevices somewhere, and we're too moronic to find them.
On the plus side, I wonder if these things might make good pets, cleaning up all those icky spiders in our houses . . . but do they bite!? Maybe it's a good thing these things don't live all over the face of the Earth.