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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 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.