Boffins baffled by 'magnetar': Ought to be black hole, but isn't Applecarts are pinwheeling through the air in the world's astronomy departments today as top boffins have revealed that stars lying within a certain range of ginormity do not, as had been supposed, turn into black holes. Rather, it seems, they instead become an exceptionally rare and puzzling space thing known to the …
"This therefore raises the thorny question of just how massive a star has to be to collapse to form a black hole if stars over 40 times as heavy as our Sun cannot manage this feat," says Ritchie's fellow cluster-prober Norbert Langer.
Clearly this pseudo-boffin has mixed his metaphoric categories here. Just because this star HASN'T collapsed to a black hole doesn't necessarily mean it COULDN'T have done. It's obvious that a star with such a powerful magnetic field would not want to go gentle into that good night (the proof is left to the student as an exercise), whether it was or was not able.
It's just this kind of short-sighted astro-anthropomorphism that we true cosmo-boffins must deride and abhor.
You might want to do a little background reading on neutron stars. Matter on the surface does not get crushed into neutrons, and forms a solid "crust". Underneath that is a multi-layered core, the exact composition of which is not fully understood, and almost certainly is composed of more than just neutrons.
Hannes Alfvén had told us a four decades ago that electromagnetism plays a major part in the universe.
For example, snatching a quote from Wikipedia, "Space is filled with a network of currents which transfer energy and momentum over large or very large distances. The currents often pinch to filamentary or surface currents. The latter are likely to give space, as also interstellar and intergalactic space, a cellular structure."
It's odd that it has taken so long for the mainstream to begin to see what he had been saying. Maybe magnetohydrodynamics, for which he won a Nobel prize, isn't easy. Or maybe it was that he was a Swede who didn't accept Big Bang and was an electrical engineer to boot.
> Or maybe it was that he was a Swede who didn't accept Big Bang and was an electrical engineer to boot.
Question for you: how do you tell a sudden, intuitive leap of brilliance explaining deep mysteries of the cosmos from a wild guess based on flimsy evidence?
Did his theories make any predictions that could be verified by observation or experiment? I imagine that didn't happen, either because he was wrong or because it remains too difficult to verify any of his claims. This isn't politically motivated climate study you know; academics couldn't manage a proper conspiracy to save their lives. Lets not have a "They laughed at Columbus" moment here. No-one really cares about his nationality or non-mainstream cosmology enough to try and bury the truth of his work, even assuming it *is* true in the first place!
Incidentally, if you have a peek at A Brief History of Time, you may note that Stephen Hawking has conceived a model of the universe which doesn't have a beginning or end of time. Don't see many people trying to hide his research due to that little bit of unorthodoxy, do you.
> How do you tell a sudden, intuitive leap ... from a wild guess...?
Preferably on the basis that empirical tests are or will become available.
> Did [Alfvén's] theories make any predictions that could be verified by observation or experiment?
As just one example, from NASA in 2007: "Alfvén waves [the existence of which he was the first to propose in 1942] were a long-time suspect in the coronal heating mystery, but till now their presence in the solar corona was only circumstantial. 'With help from the Hinode spacecraft, we now have irrefutable evidence of Alfven waves moving along coronal loops,'"
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2007/hinode_alfven_waves.html
Nice fellow.
He came in while we (horrible SF nerds that knew everything) were trying to re-invent the Universe; sat down and listened while Frank B. and I threw godawful puns* at each other then he smiled.
We had amused him and that was a good thing.
Next year he was dead.
*Frank, you can't have a Big Bang; the damn Universe will fall.
"If the Sun were located at the heart of this remarkable cluster, our night sky would be full of hundreds of stars as bright as the full Moon."
Now *that* would be awesome. Why can't earth be there? No rings, only one moon... damn this planet is boring. When I grow up, I'm moving to Westerlund 1. I'll find me a planet with big rings like Saturn, a few dozen moons, and I'll buy a beach chair. Probably listen to a lot of Pink Floyd.
Let’s try this again, with less late-night grammatical horror. Somewhere, a pedant earned his wings because of the original post.
Here’s the revised version:
A Neutron Star is basically a big old lump of neutrons at its center, where the extreme mass has compacted the matter so much that the protons and electrons have combined.
This "neutronium" is highly unstable, and tends to revert to normal matter if it works its way far enough from the core. There are also layers of material that on top of the neutronium that are not under so much gravitational stress as to convert into neutronium. The outer layers of the star probably look relatively normal by comparison.
Neutron stars, being so massive, may also have an accretion disk (much like a black hole.) From where we are, it would be virtually impossible to tell if a given star had an accretion disk or not (the star being powerful enough to outshine the disk) but if it did then that matter spiralling into the star would light the bugger up like a big magnetic candle.
In short: think of a neutron star as very close to a black hole. Unlike a black hole which is so dense as to have an event horizon, neutron stars are just the other side of that barrier. A lot of the weird things that happen near black holes happen near neutron stars. There is the exception that we can almost understand the physics of a neutron star because the entireties of the reactions are occurring on this side of the event horizon.
There is also a theory that a sufficiently massive neutron star could house a micro black hole at its core which would slowly grow in size as it consumed the neutron star from the inside out. Eventually for reasons that I only barely comprehend (and would take way to long to explain) this mixture hits a tipping point and actually /blows up/. (Or more accurately, blows the shell off the whole shebang while imploding, leaving a black hole surrounded by a cloud of gas and an expanding plasma shockwave.)
Then you get into the theories where they have to blow up /before/ becoming black holes. (An implosion wave similar to an implosion nuke compressing the core of the star past the neutronium stage into “oh shit physics broke” and creating a black hole.)
In short: once you start getting neutronium involved, we are approaching the very limit of our understanding of the universe.
For now.
I am sure Steven Hawking has it all figured out; he’s just biding his time until he releases a slew of books that tie our understanding of this mess up nicely. (After he is proven right that black holes evaporate. If he is proven right? Lots of debate there still.)
Well complete non-expert here, not my area of science at all (I'm a chemist), but a few points
1) Your average bar magnet is essentially charge neutral
2) Note even the humble neutron has a magnetic moment, see the font of all knowledge at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_magnetic_moment
3) I strongly suspect that it is not really relevant, but El Reg has slightly simplified things! I realize many of the readers will be saying "no, this can not be true!" but it is! Actually a neutron star isn't just neutrons, its more complicated than that, but neutrons are a big part of one.
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As some of you know I am not a Scientist and will never try to fool you into thinking I am one.
(This honesty thing has kept me poor.)
The operative term here is degenerative pressure.
Over come the electron degenerative pressure and you have a neutron star.
Overcome the neutron degenerative pressure and you have a (most times*) black hole.
A Kerr singularity to be exact (because it spins).
The Schwarzschild singularity probably does not exist.
(Where probably means that I have never seen one.)
*Let us return to that 'most times'.
Quark degenerative pressure.
There are several candidates for Quark Stars out there.
They will be rare as hen's teeth and probably have some weird crap going on around them.
There is even one level beyond that, but . . .
Let us not go there because that would just complicate things.
Now you are as confused as I am and my work here is done.
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Surprisingly similar in other respects too - round the edges there's some really bright stuff happening, but in the main it's unbelievably dense.
Mind you, blackness is considered a bit more acceptable in space than it is in certain parts of the US.
(That's not a picture of Bill Gates with a halo - that's a ring around Uranus.)
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