from the takes-a-licking-and-keeps-on-ticking dept.
NASA's Fermi Satellite Clocks 'Cannonball' Pulsar Speeding Through Space:
Astronomers found a pulsar hurtling through space at nearly 2.5 million miles an hour -- so fast it could travel the distance between Earth and the Moon in just 6 minutes. The discovery was made using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA).
Pulsars are superdense, rapidly spinning neutron stars left behind when a massive star explodes. This one, dubbed PSR J0002+6216 (J0002 for short), sports a radio-emitting tail pointing directly toward the expanding debris of a recent supernova explosion.
"Thanks to its narrow dart-like tail and a fortuitous viewing angle, we can trace this pulsar straight back to its birthplace," said Frank Schinzel, a scientist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Socorro, New Mexico. "Further study of this object will help us better understand how these explosions are able to 'kick' neutron stars to such high speed."
[...]Schinzel, together with his colleagues Matthew Kerr at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, and NRAO[*] scientists Dale Frail, Urvashi Rau and Sanjay Bhatnagar presented the discovery at the High Energy Astrophysics Division meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Monterey, California. A paper describing the team's results has been submitted for publication in a future edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
[*] NRAO: The National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
For comparison purposes, according to Wikipedia:
Since October 11, 2018, the longest non-stop scheduled airline flight by great circle distance is Singapore Airlines Flights 21/22 between Singapore and Newark, New Jersey at 15,344 kilometres (8,285 nmi; 9,534 mi).
If that 18+ hour journey could be flown at the speed this pulsar is traveling, that distance would be covered in about 15 seconds.
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Thursday March 21 2019, @02:19PM
Anyone else think this sounds like the premise for a cheesy sci-fi movie where the pulsar keeps triggering novae?
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Thursday March 21 2019, @02:19PM (5 children)
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday March 21 2019, @04:53PM (1 child)
I think interstellar travel will eventually be viable at 0.1% the speed of light.
Send us a postcard...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday March 21 2019, @11:25PM
Just don't staple the postcard to an asteroid: Bruce Willis is getting a bit old for this shit.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday March 21 2019, @07:06PM (2 children)
By my calculations, that is expressed as: 37.2782 % of the maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum.
Please check my maths. [theregister.co.uk]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 22 2019, @03:41AM (1 child)
I'm pretty sure you can get a sheep going a lot faster than that. Speed of light is the limit for them as well. Reg is in error. I'll mail their webmaster and they'll understand.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Friday March 22 2019, @10:09PM
I'm not sure a romney is as quick as a merino, but I have never raced them in a vacuum so you may be right.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday March 21 2019, @03:06PM (1 child)
nmi? Ah Nautical miles, not nanomiles.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 21 2019, @04:39PM
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2.5+million+miles+an+hour [wolframalpha.com]
(formatting is better on the WA page)
The last one struck home to me, 1 Km in ~ 1 millisecond
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 21 2019, @05:54PM (1 child)
yes yes, and because its a pulsar we are measuring, the earth has suddendly become the center of the universe ...
maybe it is US that are going over the speed limit?
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday March 21 2019, @07:08PM
Shit! I saw a Galactic Traffic Cop! Act cool everyone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 21 2019, @06:53PM (5 children)
With that much momentum, what would happen if it collided with a small black hole? Stop dead in its tracks or transfer momentum to the black hole?
(Score: 3, Funny) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday March 21 2019, @07:08PM (1 child)
Physics would happen. Lots and lots of physics. All at once.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 21 2019, @09:26PM
Daleks would come to existance.
(Score: 2) by Fluffeh on Thursday March 21 2019, @09:42PM (2 children)
The final momentum and directions of the two bodies (lets ignore the collision for a moment and assume they don't create a new object but continue on as a pulsar and small black hole) is completely up to their masses and starting vectors.
Lets start and say that the black hole actually weighs a LOT more than the pulsar, but it's stationary. It would be like shooting a pea at a bowling ball with a high velocity. The pea is going to stop, but not much is going to happen to the bowling ball.
If they're both moving in the same direction, then the pulsar (pea still) is just going to transfer a little more velocity to the black hole (bowling ball).
If they were both a similar weight, it would be very much like billiard or snooker balls on a table (well, except for the fact they would be in 3D space obviously) - and again, the direction they are travelling in would be transferred according to velocity and mass.
A pulsar is a neutron star which can have about 1.5 times the mass of our sun (though it has it in a MUCH smaller volume) while the lower end of likely stable long term black holes is about 5 solar masses (maybe less, but lets go with that) which basically means a ration of 1.5 to 5 - or 1 to 3 1/3. So think of the transfer as perhaps like a baseball and a basketball? They're both going to change direction, it's not a pea into a medicine ball, but it's also not quite snooker.
Now. Huge catch. If these things were to actually COLLIDE, the event would be spectacular. Given the gravity inside a black hole lets nothing out, the pulsar would in theory get eaten up, at 10 km or 6.2 miles radius, which is what a neutron star might be in size, it is actually a bit smaller than the "radius" of the black hole (it's actually called the schwarzschild radius and is that lovely bit where things can't help but fall in. So, it could just bullseye it and get chomped. However a bullseye is so amazingly spectacularily unlikely that it is almost inconceivable. It would be like throwing a dart from one side of the earth and hitting a dartboard on the other side and getting a bullseye. Or a dartboard on the moon. Or even further. What would be much more likely would be a near miss (in stellar terms) which would act more like a rubber band between the two objects to use an analogy. As they travel towards one another roughly, the rubber band is pulling them in, but as they start to veer off course to collide, the rubber band will pull them both towards one another acting as a transfer of velocity and direction (lets call that a vector) between the two bodies. Depending on how close they come, they will either only pull each other a little, or wildly slingshot one another. At the point in time where they start to interact strongly and change vector, the forces will be acting on them (think of being in a car when it's turning, you get pulled in the opposite direction right?) so the pulsar could actually literally get ripped apart, or stretched out so that it loses a portion of it's mass (like holding a cup of water in your hand and spinning around on the spot).
Sad reality. distances in space are sooooooooo big, that even that scenario is highly, super, exceptionally unlikely. What is much more likely is that as the pulsar screams through space at it's blindingly fast pace, it only ever so slightly interacts with objects around it. Imagine two peas in a stadium, they're just not likely to hit one another given two random starting directions. Now instead of the two peas being in a stadium, put them in a state. Or country. The chances of them hitting are so stunningly small it is almost impossible to think it's going to happen. The nearest star to us is about 4.3 light years away. If we convert that into milometers, it's actually about 40,681,141,000,000 km (25,278,089,080,000 miles). Going back, these things have a radius of five or ten - and at this point miles or kilometers almost doesn't actually matter cause it is so insignificantly small compared to the other number - that you start to see how big space is, and how small these things are - which actually means how little chance they have to hit one another.
But, if it did, it would be cool. or possibly REALLY cool is they only just missed and were ripped apart. That would be the coolest. I think =)
Now, I need coffee and I need it badly. I'm hoping I didn't miss anything important while I type super fast as a mate is already hurrying me up for that coffee!
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday March 21 2019, @10:46PM (1 child)
Given unlimited time, probability of the collision in limited space is 1 (hundred percent; just in case:)
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by Fluffeh on Friday March 22 2019, @01:48AM
Okay, we can go down that path which does make it cool - but if you really bring time into it like that, you also have to look at the density of stars over that same time period as well as the likely collisions over that time period.
The universe is expanding so at even that apparently high speed, a pulsar will never be able to exit one galaxy and pass through the void to another one before the eventual heat death of the universe. And although galaxies are colliding all the time, the mappings suggest that it is very unlikely that any stars will collide physically. What will happen is that the gravitational forces will throw star systems out of their orbits, heat up gas clouds and the like and cause a burst of new star formation as the gravitational forces compress gas.
However, as these stars are flung out of the (relatively) stable orbits, they will start falling into the center of the galaxy more often. This can result in them falling into the supermassive black holes at the center of the galaxy. There are quite a few videos of simulations, but here's a like to such an event cause by SWIFT in 07 [youtube.com]. The visuals basically show a star getting sucked in way too close to survive and then puffing out into a cloud of gas as it loses cohesion and is basically gulped down into the black hole.
in this, keep in mind that the black holes at the centers of galaxies can be in the millions and billions of solar masses in mass - so we're back to that pea and medicine ball scenario, but this time, it's a pea and a moon sized medicine ball.