Nuclear pasta in neutron stars may be the strongest material in the universe
sciencenews.org
sciencenews.org
Nivens features several not-quite-scientific features, though he does a better job than many at keeping them constrained. I still wouldn’t consider him a hard science fiction author.
I deserve the downvotes. I'm not even a real dad.
Likewise, Stephen Baxter's "Flux". (Even crazier, here the lifeforms dwell inside the neutron star, in the neutron superfluid.)
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.
It's all relative.
Source: I studied this for 2 years.
How much energy? We can make a crude estimation: a neutron star has a gravitational binding energy in the order of magnitude of a whopping 10 to the 31 megatons of TNT, and a radius of about 10km. Make a direct proportion to your desired amount of pasta.
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.
[0] Even massless particles like photons have gravity, as it's actually energy that bends space and not rest mass.
Just not into 2 pieces.
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.
Nothing to do with electricity or temperature.
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
> "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.
« These as-yet theoretical clumps are thought to be shaped like blobs, tubes or sheets, and are named after their noodle look-alikes, including gnocchi, spaghetti and lasagna. »
Although, sadly, I think both have been exhausted as options for the dark matter search. Then again, there has been like 140 dark matter/energy papers this year, and I haven't read them all.