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Neutron Stars are so small and distant that no conventional telescope could ever resolve their surfaces, but by using precise X-Ray timing and energy information it’s possible to build models of the neutron star and figure out what the surface must look like.
Neutron Star Graphics from
Universe Sandbox
NASA https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13240
Most of the diagrams are from the paper:
NICER VIEW OF PSR J0030+0451: MILLISECOND PULSAR PARAMETER ESTIMATIONT. E. Riley,1A. L. Watts,1S. Bogdanov,2P. S. Ray,3R. M. Ludlam,4, 5S. Guillot,6, 7Z. Arzoumanian,8C. L. Baker,9A. V. Bilous,1D. Chakrabarty,10K. C. Gendreau,8A. K. Harding,11W. C. G. Ho,12, 13J. M. Lattimer,14S. M. Morsink,15and T. E. Strohmayer
Available at: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.05702.pdf
This is one of several papers on NICER in the latest issue of the Astronomical Journal Letters
https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2041-8205
Yo mama so fat, observers can see more than 50% of her surface from any angle!
(needs work, but it has potential for use among people familiar with relativity)
So…you’re going to frame drag my Doppler shifting refracted highly energetic electromagnetic waves?
Well you didn’t count on me building this tiny box! Take that reality you can’t hide your secrets forever.
Impressive work they have done
Thanks for sharing👍😀
dark dark dark dark OHGOdMYEYEBALLSGODWHY?!
I am usually missing something when I feel this way but feels like a really cool waste of supercomputer time. Still cool but scientists *usually* don’t do things for the cool factor. Maybe for the lulz but…
The result at 6:47 does look like a flag of Turkey at some point.
That superhero landing, lol
2 seconds ago
Haha excellent grammar in the thumbnail Scott
Amazing video once again! Love your work, and considering you have ~99.25% liked:disliked ratio I am not alone
I had to recommend this one to a variety of fellow climbers because of hero landing @ 3:24
You are going to get 1 million subscribers within this decade! :O
No body is going to mention how the pattern resembles that of a star and crescent?? 6:43
Impressive
This was one of the NICER youtube videos Scott Manley has done.
What happens if you get this data out onto a tray?
Nicer!
If you crack it open with a can opener, does it make a nicer hiss?
I’ll stop now.
You mentioned frame dragging, it would be awesome if you could talk about the Gravity Probe B mission launched April 20th, 2004.
I love that you used the Elite Dangerous Galaxy map to show us where it was.
Is it just me or is the music at the end of every Scott Manley video unreasonably loud?
As for “we don’t know if this model is correct.” While yes, but we, as scientists, have to apply Occam’s razor to these solutions. So while yes, the solution we come up with may or may not be 100% accurate to reality, it DOES produce the effects we see. It’s like arguing that 6*10 = 60 isn’t REALLY true because (2*3) * ((3^2)+1) = 60 is ALSO true. Yes, they are both 100% true, but we have no idea which is the correct, real to life answer if someone asks us “What equation can be used to get a result of 60?” There are literally an infinite number of equations that fit that description. Therefore we must choose the simplest one that makes sense and fits the data well and resign ourselves to know that the answer may not be 100% what reality is, but at least our answer mimics the real life answer well enough as to be indistinguishable with our current data set. . In gen. chem. lab, we’re always taught that sure, you COULD fit that data with a 5th order polynomial, but does that really make sense when you’re plotting a pressure vs. volume graph? No, it’s more likely that our instruments have a bit of error in them. I believe the rule of thumb in science is that you shouldn’t add an order of complexity to an equation fitting unless it improves the “fit” (aka the R^2 value) by 2 orders of magnitude or more. Regardless, super super cool insight into the inner workings of a neutron star.
Yeah light rays, get bent!!
This reminds me of the algorithms used to map subterranian features (e.g. when looking for oil). In those cases, they set off explosives at specific positions, then listen to the echo of the sound they make as they travel through the earth and eventually some of them come back to the listener. A lot like a very large scale ultrasound, but since there aren’t any well defined surfaces underground, they have to use a ray tracing algorithm to progressively refine guesses, just like the astronomers are doing with the neutron stars.
Relativistic raytracing…. score one for graphics programmers
How about that magnetic north moving from Canada to “predicted” Russia
“Neutron Star” by Larry Niven is by far one of the best short stories I have ever read; if any of yall have not read it do yourself a favor and add it to your reading list.
so, basically it’s God’s fidget spinner with 1200 rpm
dad jokes on point today my dude
Sounds like some serious signal massaging to me!
You should use space engine for your videos more often
Well, that was certainly NICER than some of your other videos. LOL at the end… Thanks for sharing more for my neutron star files, keep up the good work!
I can see how they map longitude by looking at the timing of signals, but how do they determine the latitute of anything?
Human ingenuity never fails to baffle me.
plays games so u can help the scientists XD
Where is the footage around 3:17 from?
200 revolutions per second. Think about that. Incredible amount of energy and momentum!
Did you just use elite dangerous as a star chart O.o
I totaly lost it laughing and ive got a cold this hirts so good :p
Absolutely amazing how clever this technology is. It astounds me that some of our species believe that the Earth is flat when others are so advanced.
Hey Scott, can you do a video better explaining frame-dragging and their effects with black holes and neutron stars. I’d love to know more about this effect.
Watching this channel makes me feel really stupid. All of this went over my head.
Hahaha using Elite Dangerous map! Amazing!
Wow Scott… you pulled out every Astronomy-oriented app out there for this video. Very cool.
Alright, looks like I have to be that guy.
*Smack lips* … Noice!
How the h…l did they do it! Amazing
Awesome science. Yay, science. I like learning. Merry Xmas.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered the first Pulsar held a colloquium at my university, it was cool to see her and know how she came up with the first concepts of what those weird quasars were.
Awesome video ✌️
Relativistic ray tracing was used (partially) for the movie Interstellar
6:15 I’ll be that guy…Is the sphere spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise?
1:39 kinda looks like elite dangerous or is it?
Amazing topic! Great presentation!
It makes me wonder how long they actually spend on thinking of a friendly acronym for their latest gizmo. It couldn’t be NICER. 😁
NOW THATS REALLY AMAZING ,THANK YOU
love the elite dangerous cartography
Fascinating. Stuff like this makes me want to go back to school and be part of it.
THIS is Ceti Alpha Five!!!
Cool! I saw the news blurb and was wondering “HTH do you image a neutron star?!”
Are all the photons spinning (on their axis) in the same direction when coming off the neutron star?
3:55 Hmmm.
Actually, I’m sure that it’s spacetime that’s bended, not light itself.
Light always travels in straight lines, in a curved spacetime.
The number of nicer puns you managed in this was impressive
325 parsecs? The Millenium Falcon did it in only 12 parsecs.
I’ll get my coat.
@1:51 gotta love it when a scientific video is using a game to illustrate the topic at hand
I’ve actually come to a very similar conclusion myself. Its quantum.. the results will not always be identical
325 parsecs? Thats MUTCH faster than the Millennium Falcon!!
Wow, so amazing!
I might just fly out there in Elite: Dangerous to see what it actually looks like.
Love the starship intros it just makes everything seem that much more relevant
6:06 – So they ran it on one supercomputer for about three minutes or so?
FYI for folks like me, 1 parsec = ~3.26 light years
Since when is Starship in the intro? 😲
3:12 dude, I’m a gamer.
4:38 god, I didn’t know that was a thing, but I’m not surprised.
7:20 that’s basically all of physics in a nutshell
This is truly amazing, I’m extremely excited for the future of astronomy and space. I foresee amazing things on the horizon!!!!
It’s fitting that Scott Manley is a manly sounding Scot.
1:37 Using the E:D map xD
“Very dead, very quickly”, I love this:-)
5:33 Update: The researchers have analysed their latest data and concluded that the pulsar is actually a Death Star.
8:08 – I knew it – neutron stars are powered by magic!
There’s more than one way to skin a neutron star 🤷♂️
You are using the term “Detail on the surface” _very_ loosely here…
You’re really good at this, Scott. Thank you for this video where you take a very complex subject and break it down in an understandable way. I think I’m going to watch the video again tomorrow just to experience that feeling of understanding a second time.
Wow, I just realized that we actually know in which direction the pulsar is rotating as we can detect which side show more redshift. Is this true for regular stars as well?
Love the comment. “You’d be very dead very quickly.”
Neutron Stars are some of the smallest objects in the universe
Well, Relatively speaking
So this is the name of the technique that I use when I forget a formula in physics exam, just try adding, subtracting, multiplying the numbers untill it become similar to the answer choices
4:02 = “of course you probably wouldn’t notice as you would be VERY DEAD very quickly”
LOL !!!
i’m pissed…… mind: blown:totally
edit : like… totally
“Raytracing”
Never clicked so fast
Random Elite is random
Ten years from now:
*What that shit actually looks like*
“You have no guarentee that just because you’ve found one thing that works, that you’re not going to find something else that works.”
Well that’s just science isn’t it.
“Of course, you wouldn’t notice because you’d be very dead.”
I laughed out loud at that
Things have moved on a lot since I spent a week looking at the Crab pulsar back in 2000. We had an intensified CCD camera with the scan rate synced to the spin of the pulsar through a spectrometer, so as each photon arrived you’d build up a 2D image of the phase if the spin on one axis and the wavelength on the other. We could just pick out the visible emission from the pulsar from the nebula. Mon.Not.RAS 319 (2), 414-418
“…the light rays can *_Get Bent_* !”
That extra hotspot might be a Cheela space elevator :o)
0:45 so it has the same angular size as a speck of dust on the moon observed from earth. 20 km at a distance of 325 pc has the same angular size as 0.76μm at the distance of 384,400 km. Th’s like 1/100th of the width of a human hair.
The image at 6:17 can be reversed in your mind like the ballerina girl if you just imagine that the inside is the outside and the outside is the inside. Meaning you can make it rotate either way.
That pun at the end though…
“Although you probably wouldn’t notice because you would be very dead very quickly.”
This feels like it came from Douglas Adams.
If anyone’s wondering, 325 parsecs is just over 1,060 light years.
I’m speechless by how much data scientists can collect on something so small so far away. Really amazing job
“Light Rays can get bent” I had no idea Scott disliked light rays so much
Just did some quick calculations on that size, 0.1 nanoarcseconds is roughly equivalent to, from earth, detecting surface features on a bacteriophage on the surface of the moon.
calculations;
neutron star apparent width 0.0000000001 arcseconds
moon apparent width 1860 arcseconds (31 arcminutes)
neutron stars per moon: 18600000000000
moon width (km): 3474.2
neutron star width (if at moon distance with same angular size): 0.0000000001868
km
= 0.000186785
mm
= 186.785 nm
bacteriophage width: ~200 nanometers (so slightly bigger). Or about 500 times smaller than the width of a human hair.
sources:
https://lco.global/spacebook/sky/using-angles-describe-positions-and-apparent-sizes-objects/ (moon angular size)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon (moon diameter)
https://scaleofuniverse.com/ (bacteriophage and hair sizes)