
What would a teaspoonful of neutron star do to you? - rizumu
http://io9.com/5805244/what-would-a-teaspoonful-of-neutron-star-do-to-you
======
InclinedPlane
I find it fascinating that people often talk about science removing the magic
of the Universe. And yet, science has revealed amazing, mind-boggling, alien
wonders of the Universe that are far more fascinating than any anthropomorphic
pantheons.

Is there anything in the bible, or in any religious text, that comes close to
the story of a supernovae? A supermassive star putting forth unimaginable
amounts of light and heat over its few million year lifespan, transmuting its
component elements from Hydrogen and Helium all the way to Iron. And then
creating this extremely bizarre stuff of neutron star matter during its death
throes when it flashes so incredibly brightly that it can briefly outshine the
entire galaxy it resides within and can be seen by the naked eye from so far
away that it takes longer than the span of time that human beings have used
tools for the light to travel that distance.

And think, every single human being alive contains within them atoms that were
forged in just such an event.

To me that's far more awe inspiring than any origin fable.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
..the Universe is not only stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we
Can imagine.

------
kordless
Looks like someone has been reading Niven. That picture shows a ship built off
a General Products #2 hull, and is come straight off the book "Neutron Star":
<http://ca.pbsstatic.com/l/41/6941/9780345336941.jpg>

With that hull you could fly past a neutron star and live, if you could
survive the tidal forces.

~~~
Vivtek
The point of _Neutron Star_ is that the tidal forces kill you - although the
#2 hull will be fine.

~~~
ghshephard
Actually, we should be precise - particularly as I first learned about how
tides worked from that particularly novel - the tidal forces will only kill
you if you are at either extremity of the ship. If you manage to stay balanced
right at the very center-of-gravity, you'll be fine.

(We'll leave aside, for now, the highly unlikely scenario of a space
travelling civilization visiting a neutron star in close orbit and not taking
extreme caution regarding it's tidal forces)

~~~
ars
But that's impossible to do. Just the length of the human body already counts
as not in the very center of gravity.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
But the guy in Niven's storey survived! By balancing in the center of his
ship.

------
biot
Great sense of humor:

    
    
      > Do not stand in your cargo bay when you beam up your
      > neutron star material. I cannot stress this enough.

~~~
saturn
Based on the rest of the post, I wouldn't want to be anywhere on the ship - in
fact I'd like to be quite some distance away. Trillion megaton nuclear device
equivalent? Riiight (requisitions shuttle)

~~~
brazzy
Without running the numbers, I'd prefer the distance to be meaningfully
measurable in light years.

~~~
dfranke
That's excessive. As the article mentions, a neutron star can't exceed a few
solar masses. You're much less than a light year from the sun without any ill
effects from its gravity.

------
ams6110
_In case you're looking for a talking point for your next cocktail party, you
might also be interested in knowing that degeneracy pressure (of electrons,
rather than neutrons) are also what hold up white dwarves._

I can quite definitely state that I've never been to a party where that kind
of observation would gain anyone's attention. In fact I'm picturing the
audience backing away slowly, looking around for someone---anyone---else to
talk to. Not sure if that's good or bad.

~~~
saturn
Last party I went to there were literally no non-techies present. That kind of
fact would definitely have gotten you some points.

Good or bad? I'm not sure. At least you know some non-techies. In my social
circle, being a windows user marks you as a target for victimisation. Using IE
makes you an enemy. Not even knowing about OSs and their politics - let alone
physics - makes you a second class subhuman non-participant.

Again, good or bad? I'm not sure. Time will tell I guess

~~~
BoppreH
I have actually heard people cursing at others with "you are not even a proper
nerd!".

Strange times and strange places.

------
powertower
If the half-life of a neutron (outside atomic nuclei) is 10 minutes, why is it
stable inside a Neutron star and what is it that makes it stable?

~~~
Sandman
According to the article, degeneracy pressure.

~~~
iwwr
Perhaps the same reason neutrons bound in atoms don't decay.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I wish he hadn't glossed over this. What is it that keeps them stable in
atoms?

Edit: Wikipedia isn't very helpful, I may just be too dumb to understand this
paragraph:

"When bound inside of a nucleus, the instability of a single neutron to beta
decay is balanced against the instability that would be acquired by the
nucleus as a whole if an additional proton were to participate in repulsive
interactions with the other protons that are already present in the nucleus.
As such, although free neutrons are unstable, bound neutrons are not
necessarily so. The same reasoning explains why protons, which are stable in
empty space, may transform into neutrons when bound inside of a nucleus."

~~~
nagrom
In some senses, protons exert an "electrostatic pressure" on each other. The
bound neutron cannot become a proton, because of this electrostatic pressure
applied by its companion protons - if it were to become a proton, it would
need to get over the hurdle of that "pressure". In empty space, this
"pressure" doesn't exist, so the neutron can easily slide into a proton-
electron-antineutrino state.

As an analogy, when you're hot (say temperature t1) you take your jacket off.
However, if you are in a really cramped room with a lot of other people,
you'll need to become a lot warmer (say temperature t2) to go through the
hassle of removing your jacket and elbowing your neighbour in the eye. If the
room is air-conditioned so that you only ever get to temperature t1.5 (where
t1 < t1.5 < t2), you'll not take your jacket off, even though you would if you
were in a free state.

------
ansy
Seems like a viable plot device for a campy space opera.

~~~
arethuza
Indeed, "the energy put out by the sun in 2 or 3 seconds" - sounds like a
Culture handgun ;-)

~~~
me_again
In 'consider phlebas' it mentions the Culture use "CAM" or collapsed
antimatter, as a weapon. It's a ship-to-ship rather than handgun-sized deal
though- probably a good thing, since 200% of the mass gets converted to energy
when it hits regular matter, not a measly 0.08%...

------
ZoFreX
I love the analogies, but I got a little lost on the energy output. What kind
of effect would "the energy put out by the sun in 2 or 3 seconds" have if
released relatively slowly? (The half-life of neutrons is ~ 10 minutes
according to the article.)

~~~
niels_olson
the analogies break down at some point. Turns out we haven't tried this
particular experiment. And probably won't. Divide a trillion megaton bombs by
((10 min * 60 s/min)/3 s), and you still end up with 5 billion megaton blasts,
sustained for 10 minutes. Would the teaspoon of mass survive that long? No.
I'm pretty sure that the first quarter nanosecond of release would be
sufficient to ruin anything on a human scale.

------
iwwr
What would happen if an asteroid (say 30km) impacted a neutron star? Mind you,
that rock would be larger, although much less massive. Is it possible for
something like that to blast off material from the star?

I imagine something like a black hole feeding, the asteroid flattened into a
disk and heated up, jets of x-rays from the magnetic poles of the star.

~~~
niels_olson
It would undergo something like the crab nebula. The mass would vaporize, but
continue in toward the star, accelerating into the gravity well. The electrons
would be stripped away as the nuclei accelerated, and eventually (eg,
nanoseconds) the nuclei would either bounce off or be absorbed into the outer
layer. Probably some of both. From space, it would just look like a bright
puff.

------
leon_
here's a more readable format:

[http://m.io9.com/5805244/what-would-a-teaspoonful-of-
neutron...](http://m.io9.com/5805244/what-would-a-teaspoonful-of-neutron-star-
do-to-you)

~~~
augustl
Thanks. That link also works with JavaScript disabled, something the original
link doesn't. Makes me shiver when a simple blog requires JavaScript in order
to access the content.

~~~
leon_
the gawker network (which the io blog is part of) replaced their CMS with some
hell-brewn javascript CMS some months ago. their blogs are rendered with JS
now - which means without JS you will only see an empty page.

oh, and the performance is horrible.

