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)."
So that's where my beach ball went... (Score:1, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:So that's where my beach ball went... (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)
Sputniks from Little Green Men? (Score:1)
Re:Sputniks from Little Green Men? (Score:2)
I thought it was because they had lots of fibers in their food. *badabing*
Re:is that really true??? (Score:1)
Though, I now wonder why they would say that it originated from an area 2 feet in diameter. An area two feet in radius makes more sense to me.
Re:is that really true??? (Score:1)
Actually.... (Score:4, Informative)
Although it is premature to discount all other possibilities, Kern told UPI, "for now it looks as though the mechanism we propose is probably correct."
"The interpretation here looks appealing," he told UPI, "although further predictions and tests will have to be made for it to carry the day."
It article seems a bit more reserved than the editor posting it. An interesting read tho.
Re:Actually.... (Score:2)
So, you you're saying that it isn't beachballs in space?
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:Actually.... (Score:5, Funny)
Only on
Re:Actually.... (Score:2)
for those who's never seen it... (Score:5, Informative)
Good pic for those who's already seen it... (Score:1)
Coolness Matters! ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Coolness Matters! ! (Score:3, Informative)
with all due respect, pulsars (and more) are pretty damn cool as they are. I am not sure how them being the size of a beachball raises their 'cool' level. I agree that 'cool' helps, and get people to go forward at times, bu
Re: Already Cool (Score:1)
Re:Coolness Matters! ! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Coolness Matters! ! (Score:5, Interesting)
Shoot, I found "cool" things as an adult when I decided that human vision was pretty damn facsinating. Integrating computer technology into the study of retinal vision is also compelling allowing us to discover what is going wrong in retinas of disorders that cause blindness. The "coolest" outcome would be finding a prevention for blinding diseases or even figuring out how to "cure" blindness or enhance existing vision.
Re:Coolness Matters! ! (Score:3, Interesting)
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. I'm going back and
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 av
A virtual mod +5 (Score:2)
The most insightful thing said on slashdot in as many months.
Re:Coolness Matters! ! (Score:2)
And Nova used to rule. Now it's a cross between Popular Science, Rush Limbaugh, and biotech-company commercials.
Re:Coolness Matters! ! (Score:2)
One famous example of this, although not sure if its true, is Albert Einstein, who was apparently fascinated as a child by the 'invisible force' that moved the needle of a compass given to him by his grandfather.
More URLs On This Story From Sci-Fi Today (Score:4, Informative)
I thought... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I thought... (Score:5, Informative)
The beachballs aren't the neutron stars, which are somewhere around 20 km in radius. So they weren't a direct result of supernova collapse.
The beachballs they are observing are the regions of plasma near the magnetic poles of the neutron star which are causing the large bursts of radio waves.
Doug
A surface spot of the pulsar is beachball size. (Score:5, Informative)
The magnetic field of the neutron star is so strong that it sends out radiation. The points of origin for the radiation are at the north and south magnetic poles of the neutron star. Since the neutron star rotates so fast, the radiation looks like a pulse to us. The surface locations that create those beams of radiation are small, only the size of a beach ball. And the radiation is so strong that it ionizes the atoms on the surface or just above the surface, making a little plasma cloud above the neutron star's magnetic poles.
Light travels across 12 inches in one nanosecond. (Side note: When radio astronomy technicians install optic cables, they have to measure the cables in nanosecond-light-lengths.) Since the subpulses are measured in nanoseconds, that means the beaming region on the pulsar is about that wide. A neutron star is 12 to 20km wide, and astronomers once thought the beaming region was as much as 10% of the surface area. Now, they are surprised to discover it is much smaller.
So, the question now is: what confines the neutron star's very powerful magnetic field to such a small region?
Re:A surface spot of the pulsar is beachball size. (Score:2)
Excelent!
I knew imperial measurements wern't arbertary at all!
A imperial foot is whole light-nanosenced long, in addition to also being the length of my penis!
Take that, all you Metric poofs!
Re:A surface spot of the pulsar is beachball size. (Score:2)
Excelent!
I knew imperial measurements wern't arbertary at all!
Except you forget that light travels exactly one meter in (newly invented, by me) one metric second. It sure is a good thing that seconds aren't arbitrary eh? ;-)
Re:A surface spot of the pulsar is beachball size. (Score:2)
Re:A surface spot of the pulsar is beachball size. (Score:2)
Actually - the Meter is arbatrary now.
The reason? The definition of a second has changed in the last 75 years.
A second use to be a slice of an earth day - but unfortunatly earth days are not quite stable.
So the definition of a seond was changed to a specifc number of atomic vibrations at p
Re:A surface spot of the pulsar is beachball size. (Score:1)
Re:A surface spot of the pulsar is beachball size. (Score:3, Informative)
Even assuming this very simple geometry and mechanism, it only means that they are 60 cm deep in the direction you are looking at them. Perpendicular to the optical axis, they can be much larger.
Re:A surface spot of the pulsar is beachball size. (Score:1)
let c = b + delta
Where did this come from? Just suddenly make up an extension to euclidean geometry? If b is the distance to the nebula, then a must be the width of the phenomenon on the nebula, which the story claims to be ~.3m.
let c = b + delta (assuming delta=.3m) This is just WRONG! where did you get this?
The article was about how precisely astronomers were able to measure b and c (they are very close), and thus determined that a (not some mystical term 'delta')
Re:A surface spot of the pulsar is beachball size. (Score:1)
The article was about how precisely astronomers were able to measure b and c (they are very close), and thus determined that a (not some mystical term 'delta') = ~.3m.
Not really. The estimate of 0.3m comes from a general physical principle, stating that events that are synchronized to within a short amount of time (say 1 ns) are usually triggered by processes that take up very little space (e.g. 0.3m), since larger triggering processes have a speed-of-light obstruction to getting the necessary informat
Re:A surface spot of the pulsar is beachball size. (Score:1)
Resolving Beachballs in the Crab Nebula (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Resolving Beachballs in the Crab Nebula (Score:1)
Re:But Do They Have A Women's Beach Volleyball Tea (Score:1, Funny)
Re:But Do They Have A Women's Beach Volleyball Tea (Score:1)
Google News (Score:1)
Suffering Succotash! (Score:5, Funny)
Astronomers have tracked the long-sought source of brilliant beams that bounce across galaxies from super-dense spinning star...
...helps illuminate one of the most exotic environments ever perceived...
...a pulsar spews sprays of radio waves...
...A supernova marks the farewell flicker...
...expelling a great belch that spits the stellar shell into space...
etc...
Re:Suffering Succotash! (Score:1)
The author probably has a PhD in astrophysics, but the suits pressured him to "spice it up". You know, the same kind of managers who won't declare your app "done" until you add pretty icons.
Kinda presumptuous physics (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Kinda presumptuous physics (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Kinda presumptuous physics (Score:2)
Re:Kinda presumptuous physics (Score:3, Informative)
There are no pulses from pulsars. (Score:5, Informative)
Ever see a lighthouse in action at night? That light is a steady beam from a very strong lamp mounted on a rotating platform. The platform spins at a steady rate. If you are nearby, such as on the ground looking up at the lighthouse, you can see the rotating beam. If you are on a ship, far away at sea, you don't see a rotating beam. Instead the observer on the ship sees a pulse.
The neutron star inside the Crab Nebula spins at a very steady rate of 33 rotations per seconds. It has 2 hot spots, one at the magnetic north pole, and another at the magnetic south pole. These hot spots produce a steady beam of light, which we see as 33 pulses per second.
Now, there are shockwaves produced by by seismic shifts within the neutron star. The neutron star has a crust that breaks into pieces and shifts around occasionally. (Think of earthquakes here, but the crust is very thin, and very dense, so the energy released is much greater than what powers an earthquake around here.) These shifts cause "hiccups" in the radiation beam. We can actually measure these hiccups because the "pulse" goes out of phase for a moment.
But, to finally answer your question, those shockwaves do not cause the "pulses", but merely adjust their timing for a brief moment. Also, a shockwave would be only an occasional event, rather than something that happens 33 times every second like clockwork.
The subpulses within the pulses are also very well timed, to within 2 nanoseconds. Since light travels about 61 cm in 2 nanoseconds, the hot spots that cause the subpulses are at most 61 cm wide.
We still have a few unknowns here, such as what confines the hot spot to such a small region. But, what causes the pulse itself is known.
Re:There are no pulses from pulsars. (Score:2)
These hot spots produce a steady beam of light, which we see as 33 pulses per second.
Since there are two, wouldn't that imply we see 66 pulses per second?
Re:There are no pulses from pulsars. (Score:1)
If one the beam is directed in the earth direction, we will see it. We will not see, however, the other beam, directed away from us.
Re:Kinda presumptuous physics (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Kinda presumptuous physics (Score:2)
Is there any chance that losses 'left' us with nohting but the very brief pulses to look at ?
If you compare that to any other wave analogy, you could say that a wave has 'tops', and the smaller the slice of the tops the shorter the 'pulse' would seem, but it doesn't say anything about the size of the wave underneath it (but the PERIOD does!).
Re:Kinda presumptuous physics (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Kinda presumptuous physics (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Kinda presumptuous physics (Score:2)
The other thing that seems hockey is these are pulses in the range of 0.5 -1 GHz, what kind of carrier freq are they looking at? I don't think anybody should get to excited untill ther's indendent confirmatio
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.
you mean to tell me (Score:1)
that is fucking insane! Now not only if we descover alien life, we can see what they are eating for breakfast as well
Whipping Star reference (Score:1)
They're... (Score:1)
Ow!! What was that for?!!
A palimpsest! (Score:2)