Whenever I read about neutron stars, they are always too far away (like millions of light years), so I did a quick search and found one closest to earth about 250 to 1000 light years and apparently it is above the plane of the milky way galaxy.
Thank you for the link, it's amazing how quickly it cooled down. I thought it would take hundreds of years for it to go from blue to red.
But I guess since the merger of the neutron star resulted in the formation of blackhole, It could explain the rapid cooling down, a la endothermic reaction so to speak :)
But without zero-padding, it will sort wrong when using lexiographic order (as is common). 1180101 would sort before 171204 in many contexts, even though it should clearly come behind the latter.
however if we invent time travel, and go back into the year 2000 we wouldn't be able to store any event data. furthermore, to get back, if that data field was used to store event data and the coordinates to get back to the current location of earth, could send you to a divide by zero coordinate and you wouldn't be able to get back. The solution is to just ban time travel to the year 2000 until a patch comes out
I don't know, but it is possible that the GW encodes something that increases once a century or faster. There is definitely more information in two letters than two digits.
The date when it was discovered is irrelevant - no astronomer cares about that. You should think of it as a unique string associated with some data + coordinates.
GRBs are named in a similar fashion with simply having an additional character at the end, for example GRB171010B is the second GRB of 2017-10-10.
And the naming scheme will simply have to change in 2100 (actually probably already 2090 because the system was in use before 2000)..
Supernovae on the other hand are named with the full year followed by one or more characters to disambiguate them - for example SN1987A or SN2013EE.
This is handled centrally by the IAU and takes some time, which usually means that the same object is known under many different temporary names until the official name is assigned (and only if it is an actual supernova!).
Most interesting to me is that the signature detected in the gravitational waves was up to 6 minutes long. With increased accuracy and quicker notification, telescopes could be aimed at such collisions before they happen. I never would have thought that was possible before.
Knowledge of its availability would be sufficient to act as downward pressure on prices. Why pay $X for an ounce of gold if enough to drive the price down to one millionth of $x could come to the market at any time?
They are actually useful for other things besides representing value of course. Given the frequency of GRBs this isn't a 'rare' occurrence in the universe, and if these materials are in 'jets' then the number of rocky bodies that have been hit by a jet of this material have a high probability of existing[1]. So it might be reasonable to postulate planets with massive amounts of these metals. And certainly there are asteroids in our own solar system that Planetary Resources seeks to recover. I think once we're reasonably good as interplanetary travel we'll see a lot more of this material being made available.
[1] Where even a small probability of a collision event is overwhelmed by the sheer age of the universe and the number of events.
Besides representing value, they have value (to us). Anything that is trivially available has its value (to us) diminished compared to when it was scarce (unless new uses once again make it scarce). In any case, you're quite right that there's a lot of "precious" metals out there just waiting for us to go harvest it. The Oort cloud and the asteroid belts should prove a useful source of such materials.
When people talk about diamonds being rare, they are generally talking about gemstone quality diamonds. Those, and the work needed to make them look like gemstones, are not so common.
It's kind of astounding given we're just dumb people on a dumb planet moving at uninteresting speeds or distances or times that we can predict the result of a neutron star collision and be right. Especially when our physics breaks down at those energy and gravity levels.
> Especially when our physics breaks down at those energy and gravity levels.
No, it doesn't. Neutron stars seem like very dense objects with very strong gravity to us, but their density and gravity is still well within the boundaries where our current physical theories work well. As the accuracy of these predictions illustrates.
Okay, was wondering about that. Still, it's a neutron friggin star. A star, made out of neutrons. Colliding with another. Galaxies away. And we got it right. Down to very small details. The more I think about it, the more my mind is blown.
Physics: what happens when neutron stars collide? vs
CS: how do I exit vim? :)
The speeds, distances, and times are only uninteresting because you are familiar with them. They are all both unimaginably large and unbearably miniscule depending on the context.
I remember hearing/reading a few times that we exist right around the median order of magnitude of things im the universe. So we might actually be interesting if only because we are unusually mediocre.
We're just a vaguely coherent temporary collection of membranes holding a puddle of water together round some selfish DNA, though. The clever stuff is all protein folds and chromosomes which is going on right around that magnitude. Not coincidentally, it's also right where you find the wavelengths of visible light - because structures of that kind of size are what both our eyes, and most of the things we're interested in are made out of.
I think another way to think about it is that we are able to discover a world with a scale such that we are mediocre because it's more convenient for us to place ourselves at such position. What if there exists an alternative dimension on a quark with its own universe is yet something we are able to uncover.
https://www.space.com/4247-astronomers-find-closest-neutron-...
I wish we could watch these neutron stars and black holes more closely, we know so little about the universe.