Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Astrophysicists detect the strongest magnetic field in the universe

nanowerk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 39 posts

Re: Astrophysicists detect the strongest magnetic field in the universe

#21

Post by robocat »

SirLuxuryYacht wrote: post #13
_Microft wrote: post #5

Magnetars are even more mindblowing than blackholes, in my opinion. Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article on Magnetars, to blow your mind as well: "X-ray photons readily split in two or merge. The vacuum itself is polarized, becoming strongly birefringent, like a calcite crystal. Atoms are deformed into long cylinders thinner than the quantum-relativistic de Broglie wavelength of an electron." In a field of a…

How do those rod-shaped atoms, like hydrogen, interact with other hydrogens or other atoms? Can chemical reactions still even happen in the traditional sense?

The temperature is expected to remain above plasma temperatures even if a neutron star could cool for a billion years, so presumably normal chemistry couldn’t occur.

https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/14387/what-hap...

The coldest neutron star detected “T https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.07998

Disclaimer: I am not an astrophysicist.

Re: Astrophysicists detect the strongest magnetic field in the universe

#22

Post by aaron695 »

I assumed it'd be on earth like the hottest temperature in the Universe.

> which is tens of millions of times stronger than what can be generated in Earth laboratories.

How hard is this to achieve? Billion $ or impossible?

Not sure, but Wiki says labs get higher?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(magnetic_...

Re: Astrophysicists detect the strongest magnetic field in the universe

#23

Post by jcims »

anm89 wrote: post #15

This is almost certainly not the strongest in the uninverse based on the sample size of our observations right? This is the strongest we have observed. Still really fascinating.

This has been a pet peeve of mine forever. I’ve just given up on it and mentally inject ‘known’ as necessary to avoid the cortisol.

Re: Astrophysicists detect the strongest magnetic field in the universe

#24

Post by btilly »

robocat wrote: post #19

“a significance level of > 20σ” Insane! Clearly that doesn’t include the uncertainty in our understanding of physics or neutron stars. Edit: I tried to work out the % that 20σ is, but it is so mind bogglingly small that there should be a law against using such an insane number in any serious context.

Each tail is bounded above by e^(x^2/2) / (x sqrt(2 pi)). Take logs and you get (x^2 / 2) - log(x) - log(2 pi)/2. Calculate that out and you get to about 1.44 * 10^85. You can double that for 2 tails. But it is still an impressively small number.

Re: Astrophysicists detect the strongest magnetic field in the universe

#25

Post by stevespang »

Let's not forget that this neutron star is measured at 5.8 kiloparsec distance from earth which is 18,917.1 light years.

Even if observable electromagnetic radiation was traveling at the speed of light, which most is not, we are looking at ancient history, because once this EM reaches earth we are studying phenomena that occurred >189 centuries ago.

We don't have a way to know if this star is even still there.

Everything studied in astronomy at significant light years distance is ancient phenomena, we are just seeing it/sensing it/evaluating it now.

Re: Astrophysicists detect the strongest magnetic field in the universe

#26

Post by baron816 »

Sort of related—Tom Scott did a survey to determine “The Best Thing”: https://youtu.be/ALy6e7GbDRQ

The second runner up is the Earth’s magnetic field.

He makes fun of his audience for ranking it that high, but planetary magnetic fields are no joke.

Re: Astrophysicists detect the strongest magnetic field in the universe

#27

Post by kstrauser »

anm89 wrote: post #15

This is almost certainly not the strongest in the uninverse based on the sample size of our observations right? This is the strongest we have observed. Still really fascinating.

In cosmology, "in the known universe" is always implicit. If the universe turns out to be flat and infinite, then whatever unlikely thing you can think of happens an infinite number of times in any infinitely small time period you care to mention.

Somewhere, in the field of infinity, a whale materialized above a Three Stooges convention and landed on a newly sentient petunia, an infinite number of times since you started reading this sentence.

Perhaps not in the known universe, sure, but somewhere. So "known" is always the implicit qualifier, but it'd be a pain in the neck to diligently write "known universe" every single time when the people familiar enough with the material to note the distinction also understand that's what you meant anyway.

Re: Astrophysicists detect the strongest magnetic field in the universe

#28

Post by anm89 »

kstrauser wrote: post #27
anm89 wrote: post #15

This is almost certainly not the strongest in the uninverse based on the sample size of our observations right? This is the strongest we have observed. Still really fascinating.

In cosmology, "in the known universe" is always implicit. If the universe turns out to be flat and infinite, then whatever unlikely thing you can think of happens an infinite number of times in any infinitely small time period you care to mention. Somewhere, in the field of infinity, a whale materialized above a Three Stooges convention and landed on a newly sentient petunia, an infinite number of times since you sta…

For one, I appreciate this perspective, I was not aware of that.

On the other hand this feels unconvincing to me. The language of science and physics is already obtuse and overly wordy, that's what seperates it from the noise of everyone else talking, because it trades precision for brevity and so it feels reliable . So there are infinite places to draw that line in the sand. Why do we stop right there? Why don't we just say what we mean instead of piling up a bunch of words into a statement which is objectively false without all the context.

Re: Astrophysicists detect the strongest magnetic field in the universe

#29

Post by dodobirdlord »

anm89 wrote: post #28
kstrauser wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In cosmology, "in the known universe" is always implicit. If the universe turns out to be flat and infinite, then whatever unlikely thing you can think of happens an infinite number of times in any infinitely small time period you care to mention. Somewhere, in the field of infinity, a whale materialized above a Three Stooges convention and landed on a newly sentient petunia, an infinite number of times since you sta…

For one, I appreciate this perspective, I was not aware of that. On the other hand this feels unconvincing to me. The language of science and physics is already obtuse and overly wordy, that's what seperates it from the noise of everyone else talking, because it trades precision for brevity and so it feels reliable . So there are infinite places to draw that line in the sand. Why do we stop right there? Why don't we…

Because jargon is extremely helpful for communicating ideas quickly between experts, and it's a pain to have to switch to entirely non-jargon when communicating with anyone else.

Re: Astrophysicists detect the strongest magnetic field in the universe

#30

Post by kstrauser »

anm89 wrote: post #28
kstrauser wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In cosmology, "in the known universe" is always implicit. If the universe turns out to be flat and infinite, then whatever unlikely thing you can think of happens an infinite number of times in any infinitely small time period you care to mention. Somewhere, in the field of infinity, a whale materialized above a Three Stooges convention and landed on a newly sentient petunia, an infinite number of times since you sta…

For one, I appreciate this perspective, I was not aware of that. On the other hand this feels unconvincing to me. The language of science and physics is already obtuse and overly wordy, that's what seperates it from the noise of everyone else talking, because it trades precision for brevity and so it feels reliable . So there are infinite places to draw that line in the sand. Why do we stop right there? Why don't we…

Well, it’s because the more precise words don’t really provide more information. And honestly, we do this exact thing constantly in everyday life without thinking of it as confusing.

For example, “Usain Bolt is the fastest man alive”. Sure, that we know of. There might be some kid in Chile that’s .05s faster, but we’ll never know because his life circumstances don’t bring him to our attention. “The Bugatti Chiron is the fastest car anywhere”... except for that speed demon tearing up the tracks in orbit around Alpha Centauri. “Stephen Hawking is the smartest guy”, if it weren’t for that absolute genius herding goats in Siberia who didn’t get to go to school and has the local reputation as the weird kid arranging the livestock in novel patterns. “Tuna is the most delicious fish” because no one’s thought to make sashimi of that weird looking thing we dragged up from the Mariana Trench.

In all of those cases, there’s an unspoken “...that we know of”. Even if you believe that each of those cases is the fastest, smartest, or otherwise best, you have to concede that there may be another faster, smarter, or better elsewhere that we haven’t discovered yet.

So why pick on cosmologists? It’s literally impossible to declare anything to be “the most $X in the universe”, first because the universe has an infinite amount of stuff we’ll never be able to see, and second because we haven’t even remotely finished cataloging a zillionth of the stuff we can actually look at. Picking on them for not inserting a redundant “known” in every sentence, when it doesn’t add information to their statement and would just be adding filler, isn’t fair.

Post reply on HN