[Cspace]

http://www.space.com...ar_cracked.html

I thought this was cool, maybe you will too.

By the way, incase you didn't know, yes, a neutron star is solid. It's what is sometimes left after a supernova.

[Dragonman]

*hopes our Sun doesn't crack* Although, I'm sure the quake would obliterate earth in .00000000001 milliseconds.

[Aaron]

Wow, a really big thing! That's awesome how it even affected Earth's upper atmosphere .

[Cspace]

*hopes our Sun doesn't crack* Although, I'm sure the quake would obliterate earth in .00000000001 milliseconds.

Hehe, fortunately we don't have to worry about that since the sun is not solid. A neutron star, however, is perhaps the densest object in the universe other than a black hole (or perhaps also a 'quark star', but that is a new theory). Imagine about 1.75 suns squeezed into a sphere with merely an 11.5 km radius.

The gravity is so strong that if you weighed 150 pounds on Earth, if I'm correct you'd weigh somewhere around 21000000000000 pounds on a neutron star (you would probably become a film stretched evenly over the entire surface). That's 21 trillion pounds.

It's so dense that the sub-atomic particles and electrons of the atoms in the star are practically touching each other.

Having a fracture in something like this would create a tremendous amount of energy. That's what they recently measured.

[Darkness]

I haven't a clue what Cspace just said... But... That is pretty cool

[Nuu™™]

Yeah if you drop a pebble on a pulsar (or neutron star) it creates the force of a nuclear bomb (a good thing to know if you ever have the urge to throw a pebble at a pulsar ).

Heh, talking about nukes, the average human has the capacity to unleash over 30 atomic bombs using just their body mass (I think it is thirty), according to E=MC2.

[Goto]

Hehe, that's pretty incredible.

I would hate to have been there 50,000 years ago.

[Xemem]

If this large crack creates a slow spew of gamma do you think it will collapse back into the star and cuase an implotion? maybe even a divition?

[Dragonman]

*hopes our Sun doesn't crack* Although, I'm sure the quake would obliterate earth in .00000000001 milliseconds.

Hehe, fortunately we don't have to worry about that since the sun is not solid. A neutron star, however, is perhaps the densest object in the universe other than a black hole (or perhaps also a 'quark star', but that is a new theory). Imagine about 1.75 suns squeezed into a sphere with merely an 11.5 km radius.

The gravity is so strong that if you weighed 150 pounds on Earth, if I'm correct you'd weigh somewhere around 21000000000000 pounds on a neutron star (you would probably become a film stretched evenly over the entire surface). That's 21 trillion pounds.

It's so dense that the sub-atomic particles and electrons of the atoms in the star are practically touching each other.

Having a fracture in something like this would create a tremendous amount of energy. That's what they recently measured.

Holy cow. That just too dense for me to think about, hehe.

[Cspace]

If this large crack creates a slow spew of gamma do you think it will collapse back into the star and cuase an implotion? maybe even a divition?

Well, a neutron star (AKA pulsar) is formed during a supernova, when the material left over basically collapses (it's the final phase of some stars' lives). There are many possible ends to a star. Our sun will likely become a white dwarf after it collapses from a red giant. A more massive star, however, will have enough energy and mass that the matter will collapse to probably the densest form of matter as we know it. If there were any more mass, the matter would not be able to support itself and gravity will win, creating practically a mathematical point with infinite density known as a black hole.

So if a neutron star were to collapse, my guess is that the gravitational energy would win over the matter and it would become a black hole. I don't think anyone knows if a 'starquake' could do this, but if there is enough energy to fracture something like a pulsar, who knows what could become of it.

[Nuu™™]

I was just wondering lately, if, somehow, we managed to reach the nearest pulsar and obtain a fragment of it, along with obtaining some of the dark energy (one theory is that dark energy is a liquid called quintessence, which has antigravitational properties), and put them in a metal sphere, where they cancel out each other's gravitational force.

If you suspended the sphere under a spacecraft, and removed some of the dark energy from the area facing the spacecraft, would it create a gravitational field similar to earth? Like I know you would have to get exactly the right amount of pulsar to do this, but could it work?

I was just wondering.

[Kaezion]

that won't happen in our lifetime. a pulsar is just a step down from a black hole, still strong enough to suck most of anything in, and dark energy is called dark energy not only because you can't see it, but you can't detect it using any method currently known to man. we don't even know if dark energy exists. it's just a theory that scientists put out to account for the acceleration of the universe's expansion.

and no ordinary metal can hold dark energy in, even if dark energy exists.

[Cspace]

Well, if we are correct with our current understanding of physics and the universe (which is not likely) then dark matter and dark energy would have to exist. They were never detected though and are technically inventions of science as the missing variables to account for the missing mass and energy that must be present for the big bang and modern cosmology to work. In my opinion that's a little dangerous to assume, hehe, but if it's out there I'm sure a way will eventually be found to contain it. It would be interesting what could be done with it.