21–30 of 56 posts
At trillions of times the mass of water, I'd have to suspect that it has its own gravity. A one kilometer cube starts to approach earth mass, if you just ballpark values based on the orders of magnitude relative to water.
Of course, if you had one of those spheres it'd blow up in your face and ruin your day. Probably wreck a bunch of the solar system, too.
Just not into 2 pieces.
At trillions of times the mass of water, I'd have to suspect that it has its own gravity. A one kilometer cube starts to approach earth mass, if you just ballpark values based on the orders of magnitude relative to water.
[0] Even massless particles like photons have gravity, as it's actually energy that bends space and not rest mass.
> nuclear pasta could support mountains tens of centimeters tall I’m curious how much potential energy is stored in such a “mountain”. Tens of centimeters is massive ; I’m sure the amount of energy must be enormous.
When a neutron star spins very fast, you get a pulsar, which emanates radiowaves that we can detect with radio telescopes. When these tiny mountains collapse, the moment of inertia changes and the star spins a tiny bit faster. In the radio emanations, the timing of the pulsar very suddenly shifts, and we call those "glitches".
https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01521
Pulsars can spin very fast, and aggregate in big globular clusters, which are thought to be the remenant cores of old galaxies that were captured by our galaxy. If you convert their radio pulses to sound, the result is quite amazingly annoying. I recommend playing at full volume in the office to spread the joys of astrophysics to everyone!
My former boss worked on this cluster https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDx14fSCWIg
In a true Randall Munroe "What if?" fashion, I'd be interested if this stuff would be stable enough to hold together on its own or if it needs the absolutely extreme gravity and pressure around it to stick together and would fall apart otherwise. So if a teaspoon of Nuclear Neutron Pasta would really end up somewhere on a meadow here on Earth, what would happen?
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10052/what-would...
I mean, a really stupendously huge boom. There is no question that this stuff would be unstable outside I’d the gravity well of the neutron star, so if you could teleport it away, you’d have an incredible explosion. I’d even speculate on top of that first answer that as H was formed under the initial conditions of the explosion, you might see nuclear fusion for a brief time. Either way, it would be ugly.
In a true Randall Munroe "What if?" fashion, I'd be interested if this stuff would be stable enough to hold together on its own or if it needs the absolutely extreme gravity and pressure around it to stick together and would fall apart otherwise. So if a teaspoon of Nuclear Neutron Pasta would really end up somewhere on a meadow here on Earth, what would happen?
In a true Randall Munroe "What if?" fashion, I'd be interested if this stuff would be stable enough to hold together on its own or if it needs the absolutely extreme gravity and pressure around it to stick together and would fall apart otherwise. So if a teaspoon of Nuclear Neutron Pasta would really end up somewhere on a meadow here on Earth, what would happen?
That was my first question and I was disappointed the article didn't address it. How can we call a material "strong" if it can't even hold itself together without such extraordinary help from its environment?
It's all relative.
To me, neutron stars are one of the most awe-inspiring astronomical objects. However... > "Al dente" > "Previously, scientists didn’t know how large a mountain nuclear pasta could support." This must be one of the most pop-sci articles I've ever seen.
I don't think it's egregious at all. We use terms like "gnocchi phase", "lasagna phase", and neutron-star mountains regularly in the nuclear-matter literature, so these aren't indicative of any pop-sci "massaging" by the author.
In a true Randall Munroe "What if?" fashion, I'd be interested if this stuff would be stable enough to hold together on its own or if it needs the absolutely extreme gravity and pressure around it to stick together and would fall apart otherwise. So if a teaspoon of Nuclear Neutron Pasta would really end up somewhere on a meadow here on Earth, what would happen?
If you read the article and enjoyed the idea of immense mountains being just centimeters tall, I highly recommend a scifi novel called “Dragon’s Egg” by Robert L. Forward. He actually wrote a scientific research paper on neutron stars and turned the paper into a novel! Hard science fiction at its best and makes nuclear chemistry and physics delightfully approachable.
"Hard" science fiction...