{"id":95934,"date":"2019-09-08T04:43:38","date_gmt":"2019-09-08T11:43:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/09\/probing-general-relativity-with-neutron-stars"},"modified":"2019-09-08T04:43:38","modified_gmt":"2019-09-08T11:43:38","slug":"probing-general-relativity-with-neutron-stars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/09\/probing-general-relativity-with-neutron-stars","title":{"rendered":"Probing General Relativity with Neutron Stars"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/probing-general-relativity-with-neutron-stars2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Another of those \u2018new eras\u2019 I talked about in yesterday\u2019s post is involved in the latest news on gravitational waves. Let\u2019s not forget that it was 50 years ago \u2014 on November 28, 1967 \u2014 that Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish observed the first pulsar, now known to be a neutron star. It made the news at the time because the pulses, separated by 1.33 seconds, raised a SETI possibility, leading to the playful designation LGM-1 (\u2018little green men\u2019) for the discovery.<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019ve learned a lot about pulsars emitting beams at various wavelengths since then and the SETI connection is gone, but before I leave the past, it\u2019s also worth recognizing that our old friend Fritz Zwicky, working with Walter Baade, first proposed the existence of neutron stars in 1934. The scientists believed that a dense star made of neutrons could result from a supernova explosion, and here we might think of the Crab pulsar at the center of the Crab Nebula, an object whose description fits the pioneering work of Zwicky and Baade, and also tracks the work of Franco Pacini, who posited that a rotating neutron star in a magnetic field would emit radiation. Likewise a pioneer, Pacini suggested this before pulsars had been discovered.<\/p>\n<p>Writing about all this takes me back to reading Larry Niven\u2019s story \u2018Neutron Star,\u2019 available in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Neutron-Star-Larry-Niven\/dp\/0345336941\/ref=as_li_ss_il?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1508933353&sr=1-1&keywords=neutron+star&linkCode=li2&tag=lifeboatfound-20&linkId=aebfd39c1c142307041b7b7c9ffae68d\">collection by the same name<\/a>, when it first ran in a 1966 issue of <em>IF<\/em>. Those were interesting days for <em>IF<\/em>, but I better cut that further digression off at the source \u2014 more about the magazine in a future post. \u2018Neutron Star\u2019 is the story where Beowulf Shaeffer, a familiar character in Larry\u2019s <em>Known Space<\/em> stories, first appears. If you want to see a neutron star up close and learn what its tidal forces can do, you can\u2019t beat Niven\u2019s tale.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Another of those \u2018new eras\u2019 I talked about in yesterday\u2019s post is involved in the latest news on gravitational waves. Let\u2019s not forget that it was 50 years ago \u2014 on November 28, 1967 \u2014 that Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish observed the first pulsar, now known to be a neutron star. It made [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95934\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}