NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
In this image, numerous sweeping arcs seem to congregate at various bright regions. You may wonder: What is being shown? Air traffic routes? Information moving around the global internet? Magnetic fields looping across active areas on the Sun?
In fact, this is a map of the entire sky in X-rays recorded by NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), a payload on the International Space Station. NICER’s primary science goals require that it target and track cosmic sources as the station orbits Earth every 93 minutes. But when the Sun sets and night falls on the orbital outpost, the NICER team keeps its detectors active while the payload slews from one target to another, which can occur up to eight times each orbit.
The map includes data from the first 22 months of NICER’s science operations. Each arc traces X-rays, as well as occasional strikes from energetic particles, captured during NICER’s night moves. The brightness of each point in the image is a result of these contributions as well as the time NICER has spent looking in that direction. A diffuse glow permeates the X-ray sky even far from bright sources.
The prominent arcs form because NICER often follows the same paths between targets. The arcs converge on bright spots representing NICER’s most popular destinations — the locations of important X-ray sources the mission regularly monitors.
“Even with minimal processing, this image reveals the Cygnus Loop, a supernova remnant about 90 light-years across and thought to be 5,000 to 8,000 years old,” said Keith Gendreau, the mission’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We’re gradually building up a new X-ray image of the whole sky, and it’s possible NICER’s nighttime sweeps will uncover previously unknown sources.”
NICER’s primary mission is to determine the size of dense remains of dead stars called neutron stars — some of which we see as pulsars — to a precision of 5%. These measurements will finally allow physicists to solve the mystery of what form of matter exists in their incredibly compressed cores. Pulsars, rapidly spinning neutron stars that appear to “pulse” bright light, are ideally suited to this “mass-radius” research and are some of NICER’s regular targets.
Other frequently visited pulsars are studied as part of NICER’s Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology (SEXTANT) experiment, which uses the precise timing of pulsar X-ray pulses to autonomously determine NICER’s position and speed in space. It’s essentially a galactic GPS system. When mature, this technology will enable spacecraft to navigate themselves throughout the solar system — and beyond.
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Neutron stars are really cool when you think about it. Spinning super fast like an ice skater with her arms pulled in tight.
I mean compare that to black holes… BORE.RING. All that remains in our universe of a onece-bigstar that is now a black hole is gravity and spin. That’s it.
Neutron stars on the other hand… they can make things becasue they still exist in our universe, and then if they are in a binary neutron star configuration, a “BNS” in the parlance, and its really cool in hugely Geek way, like a figure skater pair that you will one day hook-up but on an astronomical level.
And when they (the binary neutrons stars) finally collide in a big smash-up, the “nasty” they give off is ferocious amounts of everything through the entire periodic table in a Rapid-synthesis process of high energy neutrons hitting nuclei, called the R-Process.
The R-process from a storm of neutrons from a shatttered neutron star then splatters neutronium liberated from its gravity confinement to make new stuff.
Neutronium is so dense if you had a match-box piece of it would weigh ~1/2 a gigatonne, and here on Earth it would drive it’s way to the core and oscillate back and forth like a pingpong ball in molassas until it finally came to rest under friction at the center.
The R-process makes super radioactive of mostly rare-earths (and some heavier like uranium) of all neutron counts that decay with furious amounts of energy to make more stable nuclei. This gives off a very predictable (from theory) EM light decay curve.
That was probably how every element around you and in you right now that is heavier than iron was made, in a neutron star smash up 8-5 Billion years ago.
And when these BNS’s finally end their dance and hook-up…. gravitational waves. Not nearly as big GW’s as a binary black hole merger, but much more interesting because there is no event horizon at merger to conceal the electromagnetic signature of the final moments of inspiral. A burst of gamma rays from the BNS tidal smash up/coalescence. An event horizon may form with a few seconds, but by then at least a significant fraction of material is outside the event horizon to announcement the merger, and that cocoon of super hot debris, life-seeding material is moving out at 0.1 to 0.3 c and emitting a furious amount of decay energy.
This is the hot thing in astrophysics today — Chasing BNS smash-ups with telescopes and neutrino detectors after a GW is detected by one of 4 currently operating GW Michaelson interferometers.
Trying to figure out how many there are in a neighborhood of the universe will tell us what kind of neighborhood we live in.
In other words, the dark areas haven’t been looked at much/at all. yes/no?
Are there background X-rays the same way there are background microwaves? Does the presence/absence/behaviour of X-rays tell us anything about dark matter? link
OK – This is a very unique and cool investigation of galactic x-ray sources. The potential for using it as a solar system navigation reference is a wonderful bonus!
How Cosmic-ray Protons Make Gamma rays
In the simplest and most common interaction, a cosmic-ray proton strikes another proton. The protons survive the collision, but their interaction creates an unstable particle — a pion — with only 14 percent the mass of a proton. In 10 millionths of a billionth of a second, the pion decays into a pair of gamma-ray photons. More complex scenarios occur when cosmic-ray protons strike nuclei containing greater numbers of particles.
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10567
In other words, minus much obfuscation, hype, and discombabulation in the article, this is not a picture of the night sky in X-ray band, it is a picture of the wandering trajectories described by sensors.
”… and you can see the CO2 in the bright bits… … I mean, y’know, it’s like, totally amazing!”
NASA has released this picture ahead of the big event.
Its explanatory test reads:
Happy Birthday Mr. President,
Happy Birthday to you.
Thank’s Mr. President
For all the things you’ve done
The battles you’ve won
Don’t you know Mr. President
Our science is without precedent
We look night in night out
But our space budget
Is about to run out.
Happy Birthday Mr. President,
Happy Birthday to you.
WOW! Some terrific unsettled science in the comments. The “R-Process?” New space being created?
From the article: “which uses the precise timing of pulsar X-ray pulses to autonomously determine NICER’s position and speed in space. It’s essentially a galactic GPS system. When mature, this technology will enable spacecraft to navigate themselves throughout the solar system — and beyond.”
Gotta love it!
Multiple lines of evidence point to one or more moderately nearby supernovae, with the strongest signal at ∼2.6 Ma. We build on previous work to argue for the likelihood of cosmic ray ionization of the atmosphere and electron cascades leading to more frequent lightning and therefore an increase in nitrate deposition and wildfires. The potential exists for a large increase in the prehuman nitrate flux onto the surface, which has previously been argued to lead to CO2 drawdown and cooling of the climate. Evidence for increased wildfires exists in an increase in soot and carbon deposits over the relevant period. The wildfires would have contributed to the transition from forest to savanna in northeast Africa, long argued to have been a factor in the evolution of hominin bipedalism.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/703418
There is no such thing as a neutron star. Think about it, a free neutron can only last about a little less than 15 minutes. And no, the neutron star is theorized to spin as fast as a dentist’s drill. Speaking of dentists, astronomers think that x-rays can be created by gravity. So, why doesn’t your dentist check your teeth by dropping a hammer nearby? Because x-rays are created by electricity, not gravity. Gravity’s force is weaker than Electrical force by a billion, billion, billion billion times. 10^39 times weaker.
Today’s scientists are science fiction writers. There is no dark matter, no dark energy, no black holes. All fiction. There are perfectly sane explanations in an Electric Universe for all the things these concepts were invented to solve.
Hope everyone has read Dragon’s Egg by Robert L. Forward.
Quite a story of what life could be like on a neutron star.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg
I am sure this will somehow be connected to something alarming. Oh wait, it already has.