Astronomers discover first Thorne-Żytkow object, a bizarre type of hybrid star | Hacker News Reader

Astronomers discover first Thorne-Żytkow object, a bizarre type of hybrid star

colorado.edu

96 pointsedave11 comments

This is one of the things I most love about the process of science: things predicted by a theory are posited to exist, and subsequently discovered, matching the prediction to such amazing degrees. T-Ż Objects, gravitational lenses, the Higgs boson, &c, are all examples of how well we understand our universe.

I came here to say exactly that. I'm glad you put it do well.

that shows one more time that the Universe follows the, relatively, simple laws we'd discovered so far. Why? I mean a whole notion of "physical law" as uniform principle applicable through the Universe... Why "c" is "c" everywhere? Instead of say interaction speed being limited by 0.7c here and 1.5c there with change happening abruptly discontinuous and unpredictable (of course may be this is what really happening, and it is just our perception of physical world that is "smoothed" and regularized out...)

It's something analogous to Occam's razor combined with the principle of least surprise applied at a very large scale.

Given our observation of the 'laws' locally the assumption that they hold universally is the simplest explanation. It would require something a lot more complex than what we generally observe for such laws not to hold universally.

The places where the laws break down (big bang, inside black holes (do they) and other extremities) are as far as we're concerned not places we are likely to visit and are nice examples of how forceful you'd have to be to get out of the set of laws that we observe locally. It's probably safe to say that any place where the universally observed laws do not hold are places where energy levels are in play that we'd do best to avoid.

Here's an earlier HN thread on the possibility of these objects. It contains some good explanatory links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7020517

Here's an explanation of how these objects can remain stable I had posted previously, for folks that don't want to go through the whole other thread:

Because the density of the neutron star and the Red Giant are so different (average Red Giant density is about the same density as water), the neutron star can keep a distinct structure/orbit for 1000 years or so. When it gets to the core, fusion occurs in a halo around the neutron star instead of through the normal sort of fusion you'd get in a Red Giant core. This leads to a different ratio of nuclear isotopes, which is how you can determine these objects aren't typical Red Giants.

The resulting objects survive around 70 million years before the neutron star core absorbs enough mass to turn into a black hole. However, the predicted rate of birth/death of these objects indicates there may be a few of these in the galaxy at any given time.

Url changed from http://news.discovery.com/space/astronomy/star-within-a-star..., because the colorado.edu post looks like the announcement closest to the original source.

Thanks!

I think more than anything, research like this proves that if a particular type of Object, no matter how bizarre-sounding, is not ruled out by theory, then it will be eventually found in the Universe somewhere.

The Interstellar drives cannot get here fast enough! What else is out there?

Gee, where's a graph of temperature and density as a function of radius? GOT to be a super wild graph!

The part of me who played too much Star Control II hopes this means that if we've found a TZO out there, we might find TZO crystals on Pluto someday :)

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