Posted on 01/10/2015 2:33:39 PM PST by moose07
A pulsar, one of deep space’s spinning “lighthouses”, has faded from view because a warp in space-time tilted its beams away from Earth.
The tiny, heavy pulsar is locked in a fiercely tight orbit with another star.
The gravity between them is so extreme that it is thought to emit waves and to bend space - making the pulsar wobble.
By tracking its motion closely for five years, astronomers determined the pulsar’s weight and also quantified the gravitational disturbance.
Then, the pulsar vanished. Its wheeling beams of radio waves now pass us by, and the researchers have calculated that this can be explained by “precession”: the dying star wobbling into the dip in space-time that its own orbit created.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
“They pack more mass than our Sun has in a sphere that’s only 10 miles across,” said the study’s lead author Joeri van Leeuwen, from the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (Astron).
When they occur as binaries, neutron stars come hard up against Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and should generate space-time ripples called gravitational waves, which astronomers hope one day to detect.
{snip} When locked in a binary system, a pulsar slowly loses energy and its orbit shrinks “That was a real Eureka moment that night,” he told journalists at the conference.
{snip} They soon discovered the pulsar had a companion star, and that it was pushing the boundaries of what astronomers know of these bizarre systems.
The pair circle each other in just four hours - the second fastest such orbit ever seen - and the pulsar spins seven times per second, sweeping its two beams of radio waves across space to Earth.
Ping!
>>”bent time”<<
That was how I spent most of my college life...
The Sixties weren't go to you ....
Part of bent time: all nearly college campuses are stuck in the 1960s.
While the physics involved are nothing short of amazing, the effects aren’t quite as other-worldly as the article makes it seem. Pulsars shoot enormous streams of light and energy out from two ends, but are otherwise very tiny. So to be seen, the streams have to be pointed straight at us. When they do point straight at us, the star’s incredibly fast spin carries them away from us and back to us very quickly. Hence, they appear to pulse. This pulsar is simply spinning in a second direction a little, so we’re no longer lined up with the streams of energy.
Pulsar sounds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHEVo-LkDrQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb0P6x_xDEU
Makes sense to me.
As a personal guess: Both objects are sub-light speed but the combined velocity is over light speed. (?)
It didn’t vanish, I stole it!
When you’ve finished with it would you be so kind as to put it back where you found it? :)
Nice one CC.
“The Universe moves to a beat of its own.”
I will try.
Actually, I wish I hadn't thrown it away.
Red LCD...and built like a tank. Beautiful.
:)
Solar system sized magnetic gun.
The drummer for the Greatfull Dead used some pulsar sounds with his music some years ago.
They’re as distinctive as they are numerous.
Oh, nothing to worry about then. *Checking oil level in Shuttle engines.*
I paid about $300 for it when they first came out. Within a couple of years they were nearly giving them away. You couldn’t read them in sunlight. Still, I wish I had kept it as it’s probably worth something now as a collectible.
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