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pulsars

i may have got this wrong but i remember reading that pulsars spin thousands of times per second,is this true and if so how is this possible given their size and mass?i cant imagine even something the size of a football spinning that fast.

sandman666 Tue 30/09/08 20:02

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Teddio
Tue 30/09/08
20:17

It's all to do with the law of conservation of angular momentum. Suppose a star is one million miles in diameter and spins at a rate of one revolution per month. If that star goes "supernova" and implodes you'll be left with a very dense spherical neutron star (perhaps 60% of the original mass) with a diameter of only a few miles. Such a neutron star must rotate at a very high angular frequency, perhaps 50 revolutions per second ,in order to conserve angular momentum.
Turbocharger turbines spin typically at 80000rpm.

jake-the-peg
Wed 01/10/08
08:45

Oh you haven't even scratched the surface of disbelief about pulsars and neutron stars.

These are bodies that didn't quite make black hole status. They are only supported by quantum mechanics otherwise they'd collapse as black holes.

A teaspoonfull of neutron star material would "weigh" as much as 100 million elephants.

They have magnetic fields a trillion times (1,000,000,000,000) that of the Earth.

Everything about these exotic beasts boggles the imagination

Zacsmaster
Wed 01/10/08
13:16

jake is of course using the SI unit of astronomical weight - The Elephant. 1E = 16.347a x Sq Rt of Pi, where a = Aardvark.

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