Word: neutrons
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...best is yet to come. Says Woosley: "Once the photosphere ((the supernova's luminous surface layer)) is gone, that's when it gets interesting." When that shell thins out, months or years from now, astronomers will be able to look inside and "see" the newly born, rapidly spinning neutron star, but with a radio telescope rather than the optical kind...
...problem, explains Princeton Physics Professor Joseph Taylor, is not that a neutron star emits no light but that it is only ten miles across. "If you were close enough," he says, "you'd see a very bright light. But over interstellar distances, it wouldn't be visible." The solution is suggested by the name astronomers gave to known neutron stars: pulsars. The spinning neutron stars have intense magnetic fields generating precisely spaced electromagnetic pulses that can be picked up by radio telescopes. Some 440 pulsars have been discovered so far, all of them thought to be remnants of Type...
TODAY THE United States is procuring and deploying the hardware--the neutron bomb, cruise missile, B-1 bomber and Pershing II--that will enable it to fight at the intermediate rungs. Most frighteningly, the Reagan Administration is also actively pursuing the Holy Grail of nuclear war-fighting: the capacity to launch a pre-emptive first strike that would destroy the Soviet Union's own second strike capability...
...newly discovered stars are among the more bizarre inhabitants of the celestial zoo. According to White and his colleagues, one member of the strange duo is a neutron star -- the burned-out remnant of a large star that has collapsed under its own gravity and then exploded, leaving behind a spinning, tightly packed ball of neutrons. Incredible as it seems, that ball, which is more massive than the sun, is only ten miles or so in diameter and is so dense that a cubic inch would weigh 100 billion tons on earth. Its partner in the celestial dance...
...close together, and the fireworks begin. The monumental gravity of the neutron star raises such high tides on its companion that gases are torn wholesale from the white dwarf's surface and pulled into orbit around the neutron star, forming a so-called accretion disk. Some of that material continuously spirals down to smash into the surface of the neutron star -- at a rate of a trillion tons a second -- striking so violently that it literally explodes. Says Co-Discoverer William Priedhorsky of Los Alamos National Laboratory: "A neutron star can convert about 10% of the mass that falls...