The Insane Science of Neutron Stars [4K]

Deep in the constellation Taurus, between 6 and 12,000 light years from Earth, we find the Magnificent Crab Nebula, the centerpiece of the Messier catalog of night sky objects that astronomers use today. It was first discovered in the mid-18th century and it didn't take long for astronomers to discover it. links this cloud of interstellar gas to a large supernova explosion that is known to have lit up the sky at the same location for around 700 years before standing out as a source of intrigue since the Crab Nebula is one of the best known and most studied. objects in the sky and has continued to surprise astronomers as the technology to probe it has improved.

By the late 1960s, the advent of radio astronomy had revealed that the Crab Nebula hid another object left over from the supernova, a considerably smaller but much more extreme type. based on the incredible power of Pulsar,

neutron

stars

do not arise from bodies like the Sun, when a Sun-like star nears the end of its life cycle, it swells until it reaches the Red Giant stature and eventually collapses, exposing its core to form a compact white dwarf, but for a long time. Larger and less stable

stars

, with at least ten times the mass of our sun, a different fate awaits them instead.

Unbound, these massive stars eventually run out of fuel and collapse under their own tremendous weight, their outer shells compressing the inert iron core before bouncing back and exploding in a blinding supernova event, what comes next depends on the mass of the core. Of Stell in question, if it weighs more than three times as much as our sun, then nothing will be able to stop a runaway gravitational collapse that continues to compress matter beyond its surface. Radius shield that forms an event horizon and ultimately a black hole, but below this critical mass threshold, the collapsing core will not be heavy enough to overcome the last line of defense of the Matter as it forms As the molecules squish, the temperatures rise so high that they eventually begin to break down the structures. of atoms that convert the iron-causing mass into a dense soup of subatomic particles from freely moving, negatively charged electrons that are crushed into the exposed nuclei of atoms, where they fuse with positively charged protons to produce abundance of particles.

neutron

neutrals; eventually the core will be just a fraction. of its original size packed and full of excess neutrons and this is where the real fight against gravitational collapse begins because no two neutrons can occupy the same quantum state in close confinement, they constantly fluctuate and change between states in the presence of others .

Neutrons produce a degeneracy pressure that resists their compression and with the help of the same nuclear forces that support the structures of the atoms, sufficient outward pressure is exerted to stop the collapse when the body is no more than about 25 km wide and Its contents are packed as tightly as an atomic nucleus, the outer layers of the star then rebound and explode in a supernova, leaving only the neutron star left over, the final form of matter before collapsing into a black hole. They have all the mass of up to two solar systems packed into a sphere. larger than a city like Boston Frankfurt or Cincinnati, and this incomparable compression is the driving force behind some of the most extreme physical phenomena we have ever seen in space, on the outside of a neutron star, a rigid, tortured shell of Superheated iron encloses the infernal. processes that develop under its gravitational influence are so strong that the escape velocity necessary to exit is greater than half the speed of light, so great that even time stretches and dilates in the same way that it does by the gravity of a black hole, these torrid layers of iron sizzle at scorching temperatures for hundreds of millions of years at a time with the closest known neutron star to Earth radiating at nearly half a million Kelvin, but even this mind-melting temperature pales in comparison with the poorly understood environment that develops inside the neutron star under its shear.

The crust is a crystalline mantle of so-called nuclear paste, long chains of degenerate neutron material squashed into various intermediate states before its true form, bulk neutronium, theorized to exist in a superfluid state in the core, the whirlpool of this superfluid along with rotation. The speed of the body complements the extraordinary, unparalleled magnetic field of neutron stars. Amplified to hundreds of billions of times the force of Earth by the immense compression of the parent star. In fact, neutron stars are the most powerful magnets in the universe and exhibit a wide range of electromagnetic phenomena as a result, this allows them to stand out among the many billions of stars in our galaxy and sometimes other galaxies. , completely but rarely in the visible light spectrum.

In fact, neutron stars are most prominent in the sky when looked for in x-rays or radiographs. The frequencies of gamma rays and the spectra of these objects can tell us a lot about the type of neutron star and the things around it, since A neutron star spins particles trapped inside, its magnetosphere travels along streamlines as they are transported toward the polar caps, but when they arrive they are radically repelled and launched into space at relativistic speeds, their acceleration causes them to emit synchrotron radiation, which is most prominent at radio wavelengths, and because these polar caps are not aligned with the rotation of the neutron star, their motion oscillates the funnel-shaped rays of energy Ra IO around around the body's circumference like a beacon, sometimes sweeping in the direction of Earth, these signals often arrive at our planet in a surprisingly periodic manner, detectable as a series of evenly spaced pulses, which is how we detect the first real ray. evidence of neutron stars in nature through their Pulsar radio emission beams, which began to emerge in the sky as radio astronomy developed in the late 1960s.

The first to find one of these signatures was Cambridge graduate student Joselyn Bbell. When in 1967 he discovered a stream of galactic pulses occurring 1.3 seconds apart with millimeter precision, his discovery initially baffled scientists, with some speculating that it was an artificial communication engine designed by another intelligent species in the galaxy. , but by the end of the decade, a handful of similar radio sources, such as the one emanating from the heart of the Crab Nebula, were weighing in favor of a more natural shared origin for these objects that were spinning too fast to be a white dwarf. . Theoretical neutron stars soon emerged as the leading candidates for the source of these fast radio beacons and we have since cataloged more than 3,200 of them throughout galactic space, most of which are radio pulsars and, given the number of supernovae that have occurred, Estimated to have occurred over the 13 billion year life of the Milky Way, there may be as many as one billion of these extreme-radiation stellar cores lurking within the fields of our galaxy and all the galaxies beyond, however , most of them will be old and will have cooled and slowed their rotations to the point of becoming undetectable radio pulsars. at its hottest and fastest spinning within the first million years of its origin from a supernova, if a pulsar exists in isolation without a significant stellar companion, then it can only lose its spin momentum over time as it radiates gravitational and electromagnetic energy in a known process.

As fast as a pulsar spins, its magnetic field lines creep into the surrounding space and decay, transferring the pulsar's kinetic energy to electromagnetic radiation. This process is responsible for many of the most characteristic neutron star emissions, from pulsars. from longer wavelength radio to more energetic short wavelengths binary system, if a pulsar hosts a stellar companion, be it a white dwarf or a red giant, then SES of the IAL ejected material will be thrown into space from the parts and dragged towards an accretion disk surrounding the neutron star. The particles are then fed from inside this disk toward the pulsar's surface, increasing its mass and rotational speed as they pack together.

This type is known as an accretion-driven pulsar or Inside the magnetosphere, they slow down to emit high-energy X-rays from aurora-like hot spots around the pulsar's polar caps. These x-ray emissions spin to produce a signal much like a radio pulsar, but unlike radio pulsars which can only spin downwards. Pulsars have been observed to speed up, slow down, and even remain relatively constant in their rotation speeds. If its companion is a small red or white dwarf star or perhaps a Sun-like star, then we call it a low-mass X-ray binary or, alternatively, massive, unstable red. or yellow giant, since the donor constitutes a high-mass X-ray binder in both cases;

However, abundant energy is taken from the companion to spin these pulsars to truly astonishing speeds of hundreds of revolutions per second, and when the rotation period of a pulsar is less than 10 milliseconds or more than 100 spins per second, we call it millisecond pulsar, also known as recycled pulsars. Millisecond pulsars are the fastest type of neutron star and have spun by accretion at a substantial portion of the speed of light, producing an incredibly regular, periodic signal that is a highly sensitive indicator of the pulsar's surrounding environment. These signals are so frequent that even the gentle tug of asteroids on a pulsar can be reflected in its Doppler shift measurements, including now the first two exoplanets ever discovered. in 1992, which were found around Pulsar B12 57+12 millisecond.

They remain the smallest additional solar bodies known to this day with masses and diameters comparable to the Moon. The first millisecond Pulsar b937+21 was discovered a decade earlier at a speed of 641 revolutions per second, it persists as the second fastest of about 200 recycled pulsars identified in the fourth decade, as about 130 of them are located within of globular star clusters containing tens or even hundreds of thousands of pulsars clustered together, usually less than a light-year away from each other. The high stellar density of these environments lends itself to binary systems full of ancient massive stars, many of which will have long since gone dormant.

The tan 5 and 47 Tuan clusters in particular have the largest number of known millisecond pulsars with 37 and 22 respectively and the former Turzan 5 is also home to the fastest known millisecond pulsar at the time this video was made j174 8- 2446 a with an astonishing frequency of about 716 Herz, this object rotates about 43,000 times per minute and its equator passes through space at a quarter of the speed. of light, but even at this incredible speed, the Beast's magnetic field would still not be radiating its maximum possible potential because the rotation speed of a neutron star is not the main factor that determines the intensity of its magnetic field, which depends more than its age and the type of star that came before it as HD 45166, a recently discovered massive magnetic helium star with a field strength more than 100,000 times that of Earth, significantly more magnetized than most stars of similar size and mass, therefore, when this star reaches the end of its life and transitions to a pulsar its already supercharged magnetic field will be amplified by orders of magnitude to give rise to the most powerful type of neutron star, a magnetar. .

The history of these unholy objects dates back to 1979, when in January scientists detected a peculiar source of gamma radiation flashing within the large melanic cloud but with a slightly longer wavelength, so-called soft gamma rays, which soon became visible. They faded and evaded detection for 2 more months, but on March 5 of that same year the object returned to the night sky with one of the brightest Gamay bursts ever recorded at that time.They released as much energy in a fifth of a second as the Sun did in a thousand years, while neutron stars quickly emerged as the prime suspects, both the softness of the gamma rays and their repetitive nature demonstrating a phenomenon that was clearly abnormal.

By the end of the year, scientists had stumbled upon three such signals, which they called soft Gamay repeaters, which periodically flashed with low-energy gamma rays for about a week before fading again for months or even years, but for Each of their respective flashes shed new light on the underlying power of the objects in question, as scientists were able to compare their rotation rates with their downward spin levels to deduce the strength of their associated magnetic fields and all three hint field strengths on the order of at least 100 trillion gaus, perhaps even a trillion, which is two trillion times stronger than the magnetic field surrounding the Earth and the maximum level of efficiency for a rotating radiating neutron star , meanwhile astronomers had begun to discover signals. of a second type of repetitive high-energy anomalous signal, but this time an X-ray signature, they soon became known as anomalous X-ray pulsars with a different driving mechanism than a conventional accretion-driven Scientists quickly noted that these recurring bursts of very short X-rays were just a stone's throw away in the electromagnetic spectrum from those soft emissions from the Gamay repeater on the other side of the fence, strongly implying a shared origin.

Both are the product of explosions, eruptions and earthquakes in the strongest magnetic fields. objects in the universe's magnetar (a term adopted for them in the early 1990s, with only about 25 known around the galaxy to this day) magnetars are evidently much rarer than conventional pulsars, probably because they represent only a brief phase early in the life cycle of the most magnetized neutron stars. but during this brief window of magnetic reconnection mega flares and field decay are catalysts for some of the most energetic and explosive electromagnetic activity we see in neutron stars. Anomalous cause starquakes on their surface as these dead stars spin their metallic crusts are tormented on both sides below by extraordinary electrical currents from the swirling superfluid neutronium material and from above by the strain of dragging twisted magnetic field lines on the surface Finally this crystalline layer is under so much stress that a small portion cracks, moving slightly towards a more spherical configuration.

This adjustment can only occur in a matter of micrometers, but when it comes to a magnetar, even these fine margins are enough to unleash a large torrent of radiation, including high-energy Second more than 150,000 years of solar energy in gamma rays despite residing in more than 40,000 lights of the solar system, the shock waves from this star still managed to induce the earthquake. a notable effect on the level of ionization in the Earth's upper atmosphere, if such an explosion occurred even within 10 light years of our planet it would mean the end of most life on Earth, the crazy gamma radiation would degrade by complete the protective magnetic bubble of our planet, allowing the omnipresent solar energy. radiation to erode the protective layers of the atmosphere, boiling our oceans and turning the surface of this planet into a parched, airless wasteland.

A wasteland bombarded by unsustainable levels of radiation and gamma rays are not the only type of abundant radiation believed to flow from the cracks of starquakes. They have also been touted as a potential source of fast radio bursts (short-lived anomalous signals filled with radio noise for which there is no concrete theory to explain the approximately 700 recorded to date). What's more, about 30 of these radio bursts are themselves repeaters, not regular sources. emission, but recurring, so perhaps they share a similar origin to the soft emissions of the Gamay repeater that arise from the trembling layers of magnetars; Alternatively, they can be produced when neutron stars collide, collide, and consume each other to facilitate even more colossal stellar explosions as we go.

As we have already mentioned, the fastest spinning pulsars are very accurate indicators of their surrounding environment and it was through this method that American physicists Joseph Taylor and Russell Hul took home the Nobel Prize in 1993 for capturing observational evidence of the general relativity at work around the first binary system. PSAR, their Doppler shift measurements showed a rapidly spinning PSAR 1913+16 and a slower, cooler neutron star sinking toward each other, their orbits narrowing as energy is lost from the system radiating out as waves in the structure of Space-Time itself, a key prediction of Einstein. 80 years earlier, this was the first time gravitational waves were observed empirically, but it would be another 30 years before Humanity achieved its first direct detection in 2015 with the laser at the Therometer Gravitational Wave Observatory when two compact massive bodies rotating As they spiral inward, they come very close to each other, whether black holes, neutron stars, or both, their gigantic masses and influences accelerating to speeds that eventually reach 2/3 the speed of light.

This rapid orbital motion of such pervasive gravitational influences lifts the spacetime around the merger, sending out waves of gravity that sound omnidirectionally. For billions of light cheers through space ultimately destined to be detected by Ligo's sensitive suite of wave-seeking instruments, the detection of these signals often serves as a precursor to pinpointing the precise location of the cataclysmic event. which soon follows once a pair of neutron stars merge. close enough are accelerated to speeds that exceed their own escape velocities, rupturing their iron shells and briefly exposing their internal contents to the near vacuum of space, a small portion of this superdense material can escape and suddenly find themselves under a fraction of the pressure I had. inside its progenitor neutron star, causing it to ignite and explode into a tremendous Killan NOA, as powerful as the strongest super and, like a supernova, the ejector of these explosions is laced with intersecting heavy atomic nuclei by freely moving neutrons and protons that combine through R and P processes produce treasures of the heaviest elements in the universe, from iron, gold and silver to platinum, uranium and thorium, along with everything else .

In fact, it is now generally believed that kilan, not supernovae, are responsible for most of the seeding of the galactic environment. with their heavy and complex elements that include many of the ingredients mixed in the recipe for life on this world and just like exploding stars, colliding neutron stars also produce their own kind of gay explosions, huge explosions. of shorter wavelength radiation seen illuminating the skies of Gamay telescopes are used every two days or more. Gamay explosions lasting from a few seconds to a couple of minutes are believed to be the result of a kilov supernova;

On the other hand, the exposure of shattered neutron stars to space is much shorter. There is only enough time for a brief Gamay burst and perhaps a quick radio burst lasting 2 seconds or less. Almost immediately, the remains of both defunct neutron stars are dragged back to form a new composite object that in turn undergoes gravitational collapse under the same conditions. As before, if the combined mass is greater than 2.5 or three times the mass of our sun, then the bodies will form a new black hole below the threshold, they will simply gather into a new heavier recycled pulsar or perhaps a magnetar restarting its evolutionary cycle.

The question is: what if the combined mass lies right between these two eventualities where the compression is substantial enough to overcome the force exerted by the neutrons but not significant enough to compress beyond the radius needed for a horizon of events? I would end up with a limit. object a collapsed star so dense that even neons are released in their smallest subsets in conditions so extreme that they resemble those of the early Universe protons and neutrons the two particles that make up the nucleus of an atom are both types of hadrons a class of subatomic particle composed of two or more quarks Quarks are a type of elementary particle in the sense that they have no further subsets into which pressure or heat can divide them.

They are the smallest mass pixels in nature and were the first type of matter to form in the young universe we know. However, we do not see free quarks in the wild today, since creating quark matter analogous to neutronium requires unfathomable temperatures and densities even higher than those found in a neutron star; In fact, the last time such conditions existed was just after the beginning of the universe, when all its contents were crammed into a comparatively tiny area, even tighter than the nucleus of an atom, an ocean of primordial Quark gluon plasma permeating everything. space oozing the essence of the strong nuclear force, but over time space expanded and this ocean spread, cooled and condensed into hyrons followed by other larger aggregations and free quarks have not been seen in nature since. , but if a newly formed accreting neutron star walks along the thin line of the Tolman Oppenheimer vov limit for a black hole, a certain limiting mass can induce the gravitational type of collapse. that can overcome neutron pressure to achieve quark deconfinement, neutronium would decay into an even more compressed and energetic superfluid of quark gluons, held apart by its own even stronger nuclear repulsion.

Against gravity, which would give the dead star the density of a large hrod rather than a large atomic nucleus, such an object is known as the hypothetical Quark star. They are to quarks what neutron stars are to neutrons. Smaller, even more compressed spheres of Quarks glue onto matter that would probably appear similar to a neutron star, albeit with its own unique set. of emissions, if a quark star is two-flavored and consists entirely of fundamental first-generation up and down quarks, then it may appear very similar to a neutron star that, in fact, consists solely of a hidden quark-gluon nucleus by layers of less pressurized nuclear matter with a maximum diameter of On the other hand, at about 15 km, a quark star could have three flavors and contain an almost equally balanced number of up and down quarks along with heavier second-generation strange quarks .

The strange peculiars are one of six types in total, they have the same charge as down quarks, but can be converted to up quarks through the action of nuclear forces and therefore their presence would drastically alter the recipe for a star. of quarks, making it significantly more stable in low energy states. In fact, the strange matter of Quarks may be the only true ground state for mass at the highest level. densities and has been described with many different mathematical frameworks as perfectly stable and eternal, as such a three-flavoured Strange Quark star with Strange Matter inside it is inherently self-binding and may not even require a solid nuclear surface to bind it together as a As a result, it could have a transient surface that represents a volatile cycle of emissions that we could potentially detect from Earth at first.

A strange star would not have a solid surface and would instead be defined by a boundary where the density of Quarks drops abruptly to zero, but beyond. Over time, searing electrical currents from below would force any surviving remnants of normal nuclear matter outward, collecting just beyond the edge of the Quark matter in a decoupled and barely stable tangible crust. This surface would have an extremely short life in a short time and would collapse again into the strangestar to catalyze a plethora of Gamoray emissions that have been touted as a possible explanation for the so-called soft Gamay anomalous repeaters that showed deviations from conventional magnetars;

After that, Quark's strange, chaotic interior would once again be exposed to the cold expanse of outer space and because Strange Matter is believed to be so stable that anything lost from the body during this cycle of bursts would likely would maintain its ground state by manifesting as a particle-sized nugget of strange Quark matter known as a Strangelet, if such lost, freer-flowing nuggets entered a system with more conventional celestial objects, such as ordinary stars and planets, instead of lose its status or explode on impact, a stranger lets May contaminate its impactor and pass through its floor. Properties of the state dissolving the structures of atoms and reducing them to strange quark matter that eventually induces a snowball. process that causes the body to collapse into a strange Quark planet or a strange dwarf Quark, although the long-term stability of these mid-range mass objects is still under debate either way, with no means of distinguishing them from conventional theories about quarks and strange quarks.

Stars can be seen as little more than speculation for now, for now they remain firmly in theoretical realms, having been predicted and described with mathematics but never reflected in reality through observations; However, there is one more type of, so to speak, hybrid neutron star that we know of. We have not yet covered what may not only be possible but could even have occurred within our own cosmic backyard gr j16 55-40 formerly X-ray Nova Scotia 1994 is a chaotic binary system 10,000 light years away that hosts a small evolved f-type that is losing gas and matter to an invisible creator companion that is inferred to be a black hole with a mass several times greater than the sun.

These objects orbit each other at considerable speeds, suggesting that they were born with this momentum of the same parent object a hybrid star that was itself the product of a neutron star gone rogue in a binary system, only this time the companion was not a dwarf star but rather a gigantic radiant red giant, too large to be shattered when its decaying orbit brought it within range of its neighbor, rather than the internal spiral. A neutron star would have sunk beneath the outer layer of the Giant's Photosphere to create a Thorn Jitk object. years swirling towards the Giant's core dragging its magnetic field and gravitational influences through the plasma and disturbing the internal structure from the outside, such an object would not look much different from an ordinary evolved Red Giant;

In fact, most of the candidate Thorn jitk objects presented over the years have turned out to be late-stage asymptotic giant branching stars, but within one of these hybrid stars chaos would ensue as its internal structure became unhinged, the core itself would be Put into orbit around the neutron star, these objects would circle each other and get closer together before merging. and devouring most of the star's interior in a newly formed black hole, but beyond the limits of its event horizon, large SES layers of the now hollow red giants would remain and it is this leftover material that is believed to be has condensed to form the curiously unmas.

The f-type star that spins and powers the black hole to this day serves simply to illustrate how much can arise purely from the Discord unleashed by these cosmic infernos. Despite their tendency to pulverize their surroundings, the omnipresent influences of neutron stars still exist. They have made fundamental contributions to the vision of our galaxy and have prepared it with the ingredients for life, dragging it alone into its inhabited era and, if we look at it this way, their discovery has been just as important to

science

as it would have been if the lgm1 signal had really turned out to be unique to Aliens and with that I wish you good evening, see that logging out is