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Palomar

Member

From: USA

Registered: 2002-05-30

Posts: 9,734

Re: J0737--3039

http://skyandtelescope.com/news/article … asp]Binary Pulsar Spins Up a Storm

*This deserves a thread of its own.    It was discovered in 2003; perhaps we've discussed this before/it's been posted, but I honestly don't recall and "Search" didn't yield up a result. 

Discovered with a radio telescope in Australia (Parkes).  They pair is separated by a mere 800,000 km -- twice the distance of the Earth and Moon.  Short orbit time. 

"With two extremely dense spheres (a teaspoon of neutron-star stuff contains about as much mass as all the people on Earth) circling one another in just 2.4 hours, the system's potential as a relativity-testing laboratory was immediately apparent."

Check out info on magnetosheath interaction.

Fascinating. 

--Cindy 

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We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...

--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)