[QUOTE] Astronomers working with NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), led by Caltech's Fiona Harrison, have found a pulsating dead star beaming with the energy of about 10 million suns. The object, previously thought to be a black hole because it is so powerful, is in fact a pulsar—the incredibly dense rotating remains of a star.
"This compact little stellar remnant is a real powerhouse. We've never seen anything quite like it," says Harrison, NuSTAR's principal investigator and the Benjamin M. Rosen Professor of Physics at Caltech. "We all thought an object with that much energy had to be a black hole."
Dom Walton, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech who works with NuSTAR data, says that with its extreme energy, this pulsar takes the top prize in the weirdness category. Pulsars are typically between one and two times the mass of the sun. This new pulsar presumably falls in that same range but shines about 100 times brighter than theory suggests something of its mass should be able to.
"We've never seen a pulsar even close to being this bright," Walton says. "Honestly, we don't know how this happens, and theorists will be chewing on it for a long time." Besides being weird, the finding will help scientists better understand a class of very bright X-ray sources, called ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs).[/QUOTE]
[IMG]http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx/news/2014/nustardiscov.jpg[/IMG]
[url]http://phys.org/news/2014-10-ultraluminous-pulsar-nustar-impossibly-bright.html[/url]
My bet is on a Intergalactic Las Vegas
If it's there then it isn't impossible now is it?
Maybe it's the same mechanism as a black hole? An accretion disk? Maybe there's another object there and the two are interacting? Maybe just something really weird happened to it and now it's unreasonably hot (though measuring temperature is piss easy and they would've mentioned if it was too hot).
Maybe it's a fucking pulsing black hole and not a pulsar at all somehow, though that would be -profoundly- weird.
This is a [I]fun[/I] one.
[QUOTE=FalconKrunch;46190763]If it's there then it isn't impossible now is it?[/QUOTE]
There are always errors with readings and sensor malfunctions. Not saying this is the case though, it's just a possibility.
[QUOTE=FalconKrunch;46190763]If it's there then it isn't impossible now is it?[/QUOTE]
That's not what they're saying. It's impossible according to their current theories, but this discovery means that they'll have to alter their theories. Did you just read the title and not the article?
edit - Also, the word 'impossible' is only used in the title of the article. I haven't found it anywhere in the article itself.
Maybe it's a white hole.
[QUOTE=Zergeant;46190885]Maybe it's a white hole.[/QUOTE]
no it's not
[QUOTE=Zergeant;46190885]Maybe it's a white hole.[/QUOTE]
hey that's racist
Maybe its aliens decelerating using some form of pulsed drive....
Or just a star that we haven't seen before
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