> Unlike traditional pulsars, which are produced by neutron stars and spit out radio signals every few seconds or milliseconds, LPTs emit pulses at intervals of minutes or hours apart — a period previously thought to be impossible.
Pulsar's pulse comes from their spin contorting the magnetic field lines. When they slow down, they lose energy, and at some point they don't have enough to create XRays.
I used to feel this way too. It’s not really nothing if that helps. It still has 3 dimensions. Light and gravity pass through it. It has “vacuum energy” and virtual particles. There are still atoms, albeit further apart.
I know, but it is still a pretty dreadful thing to think about.
I mean, the radius of Boötes Void is 330M light years across. I can't fathom that amount of nothing. A photon enters the Boötes void, and if it travels through its center it will take more than half a billion years to reach the other side.
In a sense it's the same thing when I think of the end of the universe. There's a comfort in thinking of a great collapse. A sense of finality, like a board game being put back in the box. In the other hand, the possibility of a heat death is absolutely dreadful. Just a never ending lingering darkness with white dwarfs slowly fading into black. No ending, no great boom, no blaze of glory.
Cheer up! If the universe is really inside a black hole from a parent universe eventually it may evaporate via hawking radiation if the same laws of physics hold. :) Maybe heat death is just the flip side of Hawking radiation?
magnetars have got nothing on quasars, an entire galactic core with a 10 billion solar mass black hole in the middle pounding out radiation. (I'd say you'd have a whelk's chance in a supernova in one of them, but they're bigger than a supernova.)
All ordinary "room temperature and pressure" matter that we're used to -- that we're made of -- can be thought of as bathtub foam compared to a neutron star stuff that is more like a tungsten brick in that analogy.
Well, not quite, because that analogy misses ten orders of magnitude of density difference. That just hurts my brain.
Magnetars are a whole other level of eldritch madness. The energy density of their magnetic fields is ten thousand times the density of lead.
Let that sink in for a minute.
The vacuum around a magnetar contains so much energy in the magnetic field alone that thanks to the E=mc² conversion ratio between energy and mass it has a "mass density" that is the direct equivalent to every single atomic bomb on the planet blowing up all at once and the released energy of all of that getting packed into a cubic centimeter.
aren't pulsars and magnetars very small when talking about stars and planets? Google's AI says about 20km in diameter but would need to double check that. On the other hand, IIRC the energy output of a pulsar compared to its physical size is pretty scary. You wouldn't want one in your neighborhood.
They are both forms of neutron stars, which average around 20km but are the densest objects known to man. Fun fact, one sugar cube of their material would weigh about as much as a mountain (https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/objects/neutron_stars1...).
Pulsars shoot beams out of their magnetic poles so they are directed but in a beam. Even the narrowest would be lots of stars. They are also spinning so they sweep a larger area.
This type of emission may be directed (or at least, emitted by something rotating, so directed at different locations around a circle as it rotates). That would leave it firing at Earth some of the time, and firing other places at other times.
Or, it could be something that flares up every 44 minutes, and is emitted in all directions at once. We really don't know.
If Earth is in the "sweep" of that rotation, the rise and falloff of the (continuous) signal will follow strict gaussian slopes outside the main beam, due to long-range diffraction.
Pulses could follow such a slope, too, but might not, and that would provide differentiation.
The name isn't random! It's common in astronomy to encode the targets position in the name in sexagesimal units. It's useful because you can read the name and immediately know where it is on the sky.
In this case, J1832-0911 means a right ascension of 18h(hours) 32m(minutes) and a declination of -9°(degrees)11'(arcminutes). Using this, you could quickly work out whether it's visible from your location.
the concept of self respect itself may be alien to "aliens".
it's a human construct / concept.
also, stop calling them aliens. it is disrespectful.
(otherwise they might zap us with their thought cannon, compared to which light sabers are like toothpicks.)
they have as much right to be in this universe as we have. the term "alien" is a human and sci-fi construct.
and sci-fi is, well, fi(ction).
call them extra terrestrial beings, or just other beings.
we need to realise that other beings can have other sets of values than we do, or even none. heck, they may not even have the concept of values. and there is nothing wrong with that.
i can go on, but I'll stop here. my other being friends are calling me for a get together.
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