Right Before Our Eyes (Pulsar started emitting powerful bursts of x-rays like a magnetar.)

ScienceNOW Daily News ^ | 21 February 2008 | Phil Berardelli

[kinoxi]

I love it when they are wrong. It should make them rethink the models but they usually just make fictitious things up as a response.

[verum ago]

interesting.. wonder what all changes to current theory this'll entail

"...artist's conception shows a neutron star known as a magnetar crackling with extremely powerful magnetic activity."

Oh, so that's what that was.. I never knew that magnetic energy crackles along field lines that resemble Bohr Model electron orbitals... or that a neutron star looks uncannily like a computer rendering of the Sun. A pity so many "artist's renderings" nowadays apparently are no longer done by a real artist that studies the subject aforehand. My guess is the task is just delegated to an undergraduate graphics arts intern as an afterthought most of the time.

[verum ago]

It should make them rethink the models but they usually just make fictitious things up as a response.

yeah... the problem with things this theoretical is it's too easy for them to just ad hoc up a little change and then ask for more funding and a shiny new telescope to 'verify' it.

[Strategerist]

I’m genuinely curious.

You and kinoxi obviously have a deep-seated contempt for scientists (and even the process of science, perhaps.) Why? What drives it?

[skinkinthegrass]

....they (have/don't have) faith.

[Kevmo]

bmflr

[neverdem]

A Sweet Success for Embryonic Stem Cells marginal proof of principle in a chimeric mouse

Scientists Measure What It Takes to Push a Single Atom

FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.

[Robert A Cook PE]

So, how high are the mountains on a black hole? 8<)

[steve86]

Well, as a frequent visitor and proponent of the Hanford LIGO facility, I am looking forward to seeing potential gravity wave data (and processing it via Einstein@Home).

[verum ago]

don't have faith... lol, considering ad hoc fixes are how creationists maintain their theories to deal with evidence against them.

I was merely being humorously (to some) cynical about the price tags on many scientific endeavors and pieces of equipment, and about theoretical science— that which consists only of theory and observation, as opposed to experimental science— that which can falsified directly via experiment and not by the happy coincidence of something doing something that contradicts theory while we happen to be observing it. Which isn't to say that theoretical science is not without logic or utility.

One would think that FReepers would be used to cynicism by now, but that's only a supposition. And I could say that skinkinthegrass 'obviously' has 'a deep seated contempt' for the religious, but I think I'll refrain from doing so in case that he/she may have been cynically humorous in their remark.

[skinkinthegrass]

don't have faith... LOL
...considering ad hoc fixes are how creationists maintain their theories to deal with evidence against them
...cynically humorous in their remark....
nail/head..correct both counts...more than both of us can count / imagine. 8^/

[El Gato]

yeah... the problem with things this theoretical is it's too easy for them to just ad hoc up a little change and then ask for more funding and a shiny new telescope to 'verify' it.

That is way science works. You make an observation, especially an unexpected one. Then you postulate an explanation. From that explanation, you make a prediction. If your science is an experimental one, your prediction should the outcome of an experiment, but if, like astronomy/astrophysics, it's an observational one, they you have to make more observations to look for the effect you predict. If you find it, your explanation, ie. your theory, is verified, always subject to other observations tending to disprove it.

[Nick Thimmesch]

I’ve been feeling a little odd lately and now I know why:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v200/pisky/alienpixyhat.jpg

Must be my hat!

[verum ago]

Oh. I didn’t realize that by setting out to prove one’s explanation of an anomalous explanation by observing its effects was proper scientific conduct. But I guess that properly shoulding the outcome of an experiment verifies a prediction such that it’s underlying explanation must be true, and the burden of proof is upon falsification (should they tend to do so).

[grey_whiskers]

Weighing as much or more than the sun but only as big as asteroids, they can rotate tens or even hundreds of times a second (versus once a day for Earth).

IF the sun rotates, is it "exactly" in phase with the Earth? And does the sun's axis of rotation coincide with the axis of the Earth's orbit?

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

Or you see if the observations are thought to be the result of a particular interaction which can be modeled and tested here on Earth.

Kinda hard to fit an entire star into a test tube...

Cheers!

[JustDoItAlways]

Here is great movie of the Crab Nebula pulsar using Hubble and Chandra satellite time-lapse pictures. Quite remarkable if you are in to this kind of thing.

http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2002/0052/combinedmovie.mpg

[SunkenCiv]

This artist's conception shows a neutron star known as a magnetar crackling with extremely powerful magnetic activity

Thanks neverdem.

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[SunkenCiv]

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The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: Flood, Fire, and Famine in the History of Civilization by Richard Firestone, Allen West, and Simon Warwick-Smith

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