Resolving Beachballs in the Crab Nebula 123
Stranger4U writes "Researchers at New Mexico Tech and the NRAO have used the Aricebo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and some specilized equipment to more closely examine the pulses from the Crab Nebula pulsar. Some of the signals lasted less than two nanoseconds, meaning the originated from a volume no bigger than beach ball. Stories are here(1) and here(2)."
is that really true??? (Score:0, Insightful)
Coolness Matters! ! (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Actually.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually THEY are saying that is SEEMS TO BE beachballs in space. But they need more evidence. And need to test it more. But it looks like beachballs in space. But they can't rule out other stuff yet.
That is very different than "it IS beachballs in space". Its a matter of degrees of confidence.
Re:Coolness Matters! ! (Score:3, Insightful)
doesn't seem very conclusive (Score:4, Insightful)
But just as importantly, all that this seems to tell you is that the region from which these subpulses come is less than 2ft thick along the line from here to there, it tells you much less about its area. So, perhaps this is just the signal you see when looking straight at the neutron star and something happens on a surface pacth. The patch could have a much larger diameter than 2ft.
Smallest Deep Space Structures Detected??????? (Score:0, Insightful)
i thought blackholes were the smallest detected structures found in deep space?
Re:Coolness Matters! ! (Score:3, Insightful)
In school, they couldn't get me to touch a bunch of these subjects but for some reason now that I'm an adult I find them much more fascinating.
That's just because modern 'education' has a way of taking anything fascinating and dissecting it into a small pile of dessicated lifeless chunks. While a few teachers here and there manage not to do this, it's all on their own, and they have to swim upstream in order to do it.
It's mostly a question of getting enough of the excellent teachers early enough to avoid being turned off on the subject. Otherwise, it takes years to get over it enough to approach the subject again on it's own merits.
I'm convinced that if the authors of great literature were resurrected and forced to sit through an average high school lit class studying their own works, they wouldn't even recognize them.