Astronomers Find Brightest Pulsar Ever Observed 70
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.
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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.
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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?
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Somebody didn't RTFA.
New Object (Score:2)
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My hypothesis is how black holes often work like a gravitational lens for light, they could be located in the right spot that in essence focuses the xray energy right onto our location.
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My hypothesis is how black holes often work like a gravitational lens for light, they could be located in the right spot that in essence focuses the xray energy right onto our location.
Actually, something like that is in the story if you read it. It's a pulsar and the magnetic fields of which can lens the light just as you describe. No blackhole required.
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Over a certain size, pretty much everything becomes some kind of star. Technically, even a blackhole is a star.
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A neutron star is a gravitationally-bound sphere of neutrons, not plasma, and yet it's still a star.
I would respectfully suggest that a good definition of a star would be, "a gravitationally bound collection of energetic matter engaged in largely Brownian motion." That covers everything from brown dwarfs (D-D fusion requiring substantial energy to initiate) up to hypergiants and neutron stars. (Even a cold, dead neutron star possesses enough energy to dramatically warp spacetime -- there's a lot of energy
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Note the word "energetic". Earth's matter is not particularly energetic when compared to an active fusion reaction or the angular momentum of a neutron star. Likewise with gas giants.
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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.
I think that's unlikely. We've seen all there is to see, we know all there is to know.
...about 100 times brighter than the calculated limits of its luminosity..."
- Arthur Conan Doyle
Thus, quote obviously, the object is actually 100 pulsars in close proximity and with their pulses synced, appearing as one bright pulsar. No need to thank me, astronmers.
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This is one of the areas I think the electric universe guys are correct about.
http://www.thunderbolts.info/t... [thunderbolts.info]
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This is one of the areas I think the electric universe guys are correct about.
http://www.thunderbolts.info/t... [thunderbolts.info]
No they're not. Stop going to those websites. Everything on there is nonsense. Pulsars are a fairly well understood fenomena. Astronomers have found 1 observation out of billions of stars that contradicts their math, and they already have a plausible explanation for it.
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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 w
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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.
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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!
Re:it's an electric universe baby (Score:4, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] (1.4 solar masses) and Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit [wikipedia.org] (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.
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The star is powered externally by currents in the cosmic plasma.
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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 [blogspot.com]. 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 Chal [blogspot.com]
Aliens (Score:2)
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.
Famous last words. (Score:3)
"Look at that star! It's so bright, like it's pointed straight at us! That can't be ri--"
Re:Who cares (Score:4, Funny)
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 :)
Re:Who cares (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Yah I know, I just knew that would raise the hares on the back of somebodies neck :)
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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 s
Re:My model! This fits perfectly... (Score:4, Informative)
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?
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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
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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?
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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.
theories and slash or minds blown. (Score:1)
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Except for being crushed into a pancake bit and the deadly deadly amount of X ray radiation bit.
CAUTION (Score:2)
Do not look at pulsar with remaining good eye.