Soda Sequestration March 18, 2014. The neutron star, known as PSR J0952-0607, was discovered in 2017 about . Watson suggests, "this probably means that the theories and simulations of kilonova that we have been considering over the past 25 years lack important physics.". Statistically, my first neutrino interaction probably happened somewhere around age 10. A neutron star forms when a main sequence star with between about eight and 20 times the Sun's mass runs out of hydrogen in its core. The only thing keeping the neutrons from collapsing further is neutron degeneracy pressure, which prevents two neutrons from being in the same place at the same time. It would instantly expand to about 5 miles in diameter. Otherwise, if you look at a standard star to measure the structure of our galaxy, you might not know if it's super far away or just really dim for whatever reason. The third and final one is the photon cooling stage, lasting for the rest of the neutron star's life. Argis13 (talk) 14:18, 25 February 2021 (UTC). Hercules X-1 isn't alone in space. However, a suitably tough baseball glove might be able to snag it. A larger planet would allow for more geologic activity, which is why some scientists think that exoplanets slightly larger than Earth ("super-Earths") could be more friendly to life than Earth-sized ones. available to order from: Chapters Indigo, Amazon CA, Other retailers, available to preorder from: Penguin Random house, Amazon, Germany, available to order from: Waterstones UK, Blackwells UK, Amazon UK, Mighty Ape NZ, and Booktopia AU, available to order from: Amazon US, Penguin Random House, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, Books-A-Million, IndieBound, Apple Books, Apple Audiobooks, Kobo Audiobooks, and Google Play, Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems. According to ballistics lab Close Focus Research, this is almost exactly how high a .22 Long Rifle bullet will fly if fired directly upward. If you weighed 70 kg when the expansion started, you'd weigh 88 kg now. While a normal black hole has the mass of 9.945e+30 (five times the sun. Time is the only remedy for such puzzling cosmic mysteries. If you set the comet on land, it would soak up heat from the atmospherewhich contains much less stored heat than the oceansbriefly cooling the air by an average of one or two thousandths of a degree. Dig down, and the pressure increases relentlessly. If the article has a different name in the corresponding book than on the blog, then the alternative title will be listed alongside the blog title. Star Sand February 11, 2014. Surprisingly, most skyscrapers would hold up fine under much higher gravity. The Largest Gun Ever Built apparently shot high explosives about 50,000m. The nuclei get pressed close together so . She graduated from New York University in 2018 with a B.A. [3]If you want to be mean to first-year calculus students, you can ask them to take the derivative of ln(x)e dx. A tablespoon of neutron star weighs more than 1 billion tons (900 billion kg) the weight of Mount Everest. people had noticed that the continents fit together. This effect can be seen, dramatically, when a bullet is fired at ice. Everest would no longer be in the "death zone". The detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball? Reference Article: Facts about neutron stars. Tungsten Countertop . Inside a neutron star, the neutron degeneracy pressure is fighting gravity, but without all that gravity, the degeneracy pressure takes over! Not only would the ground (and atmosphere) be rising toward them, but the increased gravity would also cause their orbit to slowly shrink. This channel runs preposter. It might not be able to help us with this problem, but perhaps someday, far in the future, we'll encounter a problem for which a giant comet crane is the solution. Small chunks of ice falling from space disintegrate and boil away . and gently set the comet in the ocean. The neutron star, a pulsar designated PSR J0952-0607, is thus the densest object within sight of Earth. feed 2022 . You'd have to grab the bullet firmly; otherwise, it might jump out of your hand. How long would it take for people to notice their weight gain if the mean radius of the world expanded by 1cm every second? The nature of matter under these conditions is a decades-old unsolved problem. [5]Although letting a comet slowly decay on the surface would definitely be preferable to a high-speed impact, as any dinosaur from the end of the Cretaceous can tell you. These are formed when stars at about the Sun's size finally die, after their red giant phase. I was raised Quaker; I've never held a gun, much less fired one. Inbox, #10, Weird (and Worrying) Questions from the What If? In terms of the perplexing explosion shape, though, Watson explained another possible reason. It has a companion star in close proximity, and because of its powerful gravity, strips that neighbor of its outer layers of gas. Is there any way to fire a gun so that the bullet flies through the air and can then be safely caught by hand? If it were suddenly set free from its gravitational field, it would blow up under earths gravitational field. His 2014 book What If? Sunday, SpaceX shared photos of a stack of ~790 kg Starlink V2 "minis". ''Your stupid!''. Argis13 (talk) 18:05, 17 September 2020 (UTC), I wonder if the indigo banshee isn't referring to indigo children172.69.34.60 23:30, 17 September 2020 (UTC), Perhaps this comic was inspired by this fact: https://www.zdnet.com/article/20-years-of-linux-on-big-iron/ "Supernovii" is discouraged. When the core of a massive star undergoes gravitational collapse at the end of its life, protons and electrons are literally scrunched together, leaving behind one of nature's most wondrous creations: a neutron star. In the scenario where the atmosphere isn't expanding, the air would become thin enough to be difficult to breathe even at sea level. You'd probably notice the weight gain, and you'd definitely notice the failure of roads, bridges, power lines, satellites, and undersea cables. By signing up you may also receive reader surveys and occasional special offers. Inbox, #1, Weird (and Worrying) Questions from the What If? Filled with bonkers science, boundless curiosity, and Randall's signature stick-figure comics, What If? Death from Above. He'd used a massive telescope to record galaxies moving farther and farther away from us, and from one another, more quickly as time progressed. Filled with bonkers science, boundless curiosity, and Randalls signature stick-figure comics, What If? A tiny piece of a comet would float for a short time until it became waterlogged, melted, and broke apart. 66, p.83 After several centuries, it would be close enough to the swollen Earth that the tidal forces between Earth and the Moon would be stronger than the gravitational forces holding the Moon together. This page was last edited on 26 May 2022, at 19:45. Feb. 17, 2023 10:28 a.m. PT. Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems, More Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, The smoking gun that confirmed the plate tectonics hypothesis was the discovery of, Mass is proportional to radius cubed, and gravity is proportional to mass times inverse square of radius, so radius, Over decades, the force of gravity would grow slightly faster than you'd expect, since the material in the Earth would compress under its own weight. The hardest part is sticking the landing. Less often if you're a child, since you have fewer atoms to be hit. Delivered on weekdays. Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. But all that matter has been compressed to an object about 10 miles (16 kilometers . Neutron stars are thought to be formed from the supernova explosion that ends the life of a medium-sized star, roughly eight to 20 times the mass of our sun. In neighborhoods where people fire guns upward in celebration, bystanders are, Maximum Altitude For Bullets Fired Vertically. It looks like it should be "1" or something, but it's not. If you have a math background, it's sort of like seeing the expression "ln(x)e"it's not that, taken literally, it doesn't make sense, but it's hard to imagine a situation where it would apply. And by that point, you may find you've attracted some attention. Far-Traveling Objects March 4, 2014. Here's a question to give you a sense of scale: Which of the following would be brighter, in terms of the amount of energy delivered to your retina: A supernova, seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth, or. If the mass is more than about three solar masses the star will collapse into a black hole. For more, see, Accuracy of the International Terrestrial Reference Frame origin and Earth expansion, roughly proportional to the square of their surface area, Barometric hazards within the context of deep-level mining, Note on the motion about an attracting centre of slowly increasing mass. The cause of the collapse would be the expanding ground below them, not the increased gravity. But our calculations clearly show that it is," Darach Watson, associate professor at the Niels Bohr Institute and study co-author, said in a statement. 2023 CNET, a Red Ventures company. Neutron stars tend to be formed at about 1.4 solar masses, but more material can fall onto them after that. Ponytail has built a particle detector (an expensive device used in experimental particle physics) in a salt mine. So while you could lift a spoonful of Sun, you cant lift a spoonful of neutron star. Breathing would be difficult. It's like the idiom "knock me over with a feather" or the phrase "football stadium filled to the brim with ants". A page might have a title that is too easily landed upon by a search term that might also be expected to lead to one under a quite different subject, such as the case-sensitive example of "This article is about the British comedy franchise. That star can either be completely destroyed, become a black hole, or become a neutron star.The outcome depends on the dying star's mass and other factors, all of which shape what happens when stars explode in a supernova.. Neutron stars are among the densest objects in the cosmos. Karam calculates that the neutrino radiation dose at a distance of one parsec[6]3.262 light-years, or a little less than the distance from here to Alpha Centauri. The pressure inside planets is roughly proportional to the square of their surface area, so the Earth's core would be squeezed tightly. In neighborhoods where people fire guns upward in celebration, bystanders are routinely killed by falling bullets. Everything within that 5 mile field would be blown away, as if hit with a nuclear bomb. [citation needed], I'm thinking a table (Name, appearance, summary, is real?, example-or-inspiration linkies) that way the paragraphs for what-is-real, what-is-xkcd and this-is-punchline don't themselves get ungainly (just needs very minor editing and wikilinking, possibly). And they are created through the death of a massive star, explaining the "portentous" part, as their formation is signaled by a supernova. People have long suggested that it might be. although it still periodically makes the rounds on YouTube. To detect neutrinos, people build giant tanks filled with hundreds of tons of material in the hopes that they'll register the impact of a single solar neutrino. And apols again to the first explained who seemed to appreciate their submission as only a placeholder so I overwrote rather than integrated. This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The idea of neutrino radiation damage reinforces just how big supernovae are. Well, if you hooked it up to a generator, you could use the slowly-descending comet to produce electricity. At some point, our growing Earth would reach the point where adding more mass causes it to contract, rather than expand. 125. Neutron stars are incredibly dense objects about 10 miles (16 km) across. At this point, even the strongest humans would only be able to walk with great difficulty. This would be similar to the situation on Earth billions of years ago, when we had more radioactive material and thus a hotter mantle. [3]Don't do this. Toxicity aside, breathing dense air is difficult simply because it's heavy. . Sadly, we don't have the technology to build comet-lowering cranescertainly not in time to help mitigate climate change. When wateror anything elsefalls, it gains kinetic energy. Most other clocks would keep working fine. How do I minimise waste on a flight? Circumference is proportional to radius, so if you increase radius by 1 unit, you increase circumference by 2 units. Before the continential drift hypothesis was confirmed in the 1960s, [2] people had noticed that the continents fit together. These stellar beasts, made mostly of neutrons, are basically ultra-dense cosmic corpses roaming around space and, with incomprehensibly strong gravitational fields, torturing everything in their paths. At the start of the scenario, the entire Earths population has been magically transported together into one place. "Perhaps," Sneppen postulated, "a kind of 'magnetic bomb' is created at the moment when the energy from the hypermassive neutron star's enormous magnetic field is released when the star collapses into a black hole. Not only would we be unable to move around to find food, but our hearts would be unable to pump blood to our brains. Neutron stars are the densest things besides black holes. This CO2[4]Along with carbon monoxide, which indirectly affects the climate in a similar waysee pg. Inbox, #5, Weird (and Worrying) Questions from the What If? Inbox, #12, Lose Weight the Slow and Incredibly Difficult Way. One is that dropping things from space creates heat. This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. It no longer burns hydrogen, helium . [5]Close Focus Research, Maximum Altitude For Bullets Fired Vertically. F = GMm/ (r^2) We can use this classical formula to estimate the gravity on a Neutron Star. On the other hand, if the atmosphere is also expanding, surface air pressure would rise. You get the point. (Assuming the average composition of rock were maintained.). It wouldn't just cancel out the cooling effect of the iceover time, the comet's greenhouse effect would deliver as much heat as if you'd just let it slam into the planet and vaporize. Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. Complex physics dictates what happens after two neutron stars collide -- whether the collision creates a bigger neutron star or collapses to form a black hole. How long should I wait to text after being left on read? This ship is small (compared to a star) and one of the characters is indeed very cool (as in a cool cat), but dim-witted (the star of the series is none too bright, either). Your pendulum clock would now be ahead by five days. York University in 2018 with a nuclear bomb Sun, you 'd 88! 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