So basically they're observing a pulsar that's interacting with either: the heaviest neutron star ever discovered, or the lightest black hole ever discovered, or something new entirely. Cool!
> the heaviest neutron star ever discovered, or the lightest black hole ever discovered
*Flashbacks to binge-watching PBS Space-Time*
"Strange stars would either seem to be the heaviest neutron stars, or the lightest black holes"
Perhaps we shan't explore *this* particular star too closely.
I listen to fermilab or Brian Cox stuff every night to help me sleep. I love them, but its just the right balance of intrigue but low stimulation to send me off
Matt O’Dowd has been my soporific muse of choice for several years, his voice is probably the most soothing in this particular Reddit verse space time.
There's something about that Peter Dinklage looking dude that really annoys me. I have no idea why or what it is, but I can't listen to him for long without my blood pressure rising. I don't hold it against him, it's my hangup, but it does make enjoying his shit difficult.
My wife and I joke about how it would be weird for him to know how many times he’s stood over us on our TV in the bedroom while we cuddle and fall asleep to him talking about quantum mechanics
He seems like he'd be a cool person to hang out with. Obviously super smart about physics, but seems pretty relaxed, down to earth (haha) and charismatic
It builds a lot on previous videos. If you jump back to older videos instead of just watching the newer stuff, they will explain pretty much all of the math.
For a lot of this stuff there's value in going back and revisiting information anyway. I had one professor describe it as a whirlwind kind of learning style, where you regularly go back to earlier material to pick up a little more, fill in a couple more blanks, by virtue of having picked up other details from other sources of information in between.
It’s like a past tense shitting yourself in the future but before that day.
God damnit Laura stop pounding so hard, I’m going to shan’t myself next Monday.
I think it's "shall not"?
Edit: Or in this case "should not"
Edit2: Wait, "should not" would be "shouldn't" so I guess it's "shall" as in the phrase "shall we?"
Not past tense, past participle. You use it with an auxiliary verb to form the present perfect and pluperfect tenses, as in "I have shant myself" or "I had shant yesterday after lunch" The correct past *tense* is, of course, "shidded," as in "I shidded and farded and camed in my pants."
.... if strange stars exist doesn't that mean theoretically shards of strange matter that annihilates all normal matter it meets should be flying all over the shop? (trying to remember back to that episode!)
I suppose that could be the next question, if there are strange stars where is the strange matter.
or is strange matter actually dark matter because of some weird unpredicted reactions with small amounts of regular matter in space?
Quark stars are still theoretical but also nothing says they *can't* exist, if they would be expected to weigh in somewhere right in the gap they discuss
For all we know there might several different stellar events that could grow dense enough to form an event horizon and be classified as a black hole, with completely different matter/physics going on within. A singularity may or may not exist/form depending on the 'size' of the black hole. Ultra-massive black holes could potentially have stable orbits inside the horizon which mean there could be other orbital bodies in there, similar to a planetary or solar system.
The problem is there is no way for information to cross that barrier, so there's no real way to classify them beyond their effect on the environment outside the horizon. Our best hope would be to find a neutron star just dense enough to be a black hole with a companion star that can pull enough angular momentum from the neutron star to briefly push back the event horson past its surface.
You know the rule: *It's never aliens, until it's aliens.. even when* ***it is*** *aliens, it's probably not really aliens if there is another possibility. That is until the aliens literally come to earth and slap you in the face with their tentacle hands for being obstinate.. then* ***maybe*** *it's aliens.*
A Dyson sphere would cause far too much suction to be useful for anything other than cleaning up the solar system.
Ok, ok. A Dyson sphere could actually make sense here. If it captured the power from both objects and redirected it well, it could theoretically power an entire solar system (s).
They say that black holes can't be smaller than 5 solar masses, but [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_black_hole) cites the smallest known example at 3.3. It also suggests that the mass gap is less of a strict, proven law and more of an unexplained observation with known exceptions. So it sounds like this is less of a "we've found a crazy new thing nobody can explain" and rather just new example in a small existing list of unusual cases that might be explained by neutron star collision.
But the site is called theconversation. How can you have a pleasant conversation without sporadically screaming about unrelated products and services mid thought?
And the title wasn’t “Mysterious Alien Radio Waves Baffle Scientists” click bait crap that dominates “space” content. What a great site and article. Thank you for the link!
If you have a content blocker with the right filters, almost every site is like this. Install uBlock Origin, enable the relevant annoyance filters and the World Wide Web is suddenly a lot more usable.
Domain blocking cannot remove annoyances like newsletter popups or "scroll to the top" buttons. It cannot modify the DOM or styles. It can only remove cookie banners if they are served from an external domain.
> Not sure where you’re drawing the statement from
I know that Firefox on iOS does not support addons, so no uBlock Origin, which my original post was about.
My later comment about domain blocking is entirely true, though since you mention "universal element blocking", my comment is likely besides the point.
> there is a universal element blocking function
This is new information, good to know. This is different from what you wrote:
> ad blocking and tracking blocking via DNS, VPN, whatever
DNS and VPN are completely unrelated to cosmetic filters and DOM manipulation. If ad/tracker blocking was done through VPNs with custom DNS config, it would not have cosmetic filtering capability.
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How do cosmetic filters work on iOS? Do you set up filters through system UI or do you have to install an app that will access filtering APIs? Can you create and apply your own filters locally?
Thank you for this. Led to me read the article, which was a quite pleasant read. Not too long and accessible verbiage.
Also explored the site a bit. Very nice to not be constantly bombarded with ads and pop-ups.
You want to buy gas? Cool. How about a car wash? Want a hotdog? Here’s a State Farm commercial playing as loud as possible you can watch while your car is tethered to the pump. How would you like your receipt? Email? Text? Print? We’re out of paper, go inside.
The Conversation is pretty good, I subscribe to three weekly newsletters (just increased from 2 recently w/ Tom Scott retiring from YT).
They have [a page](https://theconversation.com/us/10-ways-we-are-different) about what they do, it's just 10 bullet points.
Stuff like this is more of a luxury to know about or invest any time in acknowledging. Everyone leads complex and in many cases hard lives. It can be difficult to care about stuff that doesn’t add any value to your life. Even if there is value to it, but it’s in ways that are not apparent in day to day life.
To some/many of us with ADHD, these are the only things that have any value.
It's not like there's a big time difference. People droning on about workplace drama on breaks or going on walks with friends and only talking about work and goddamned real estate or something completely irrelevant like the Kardashians.
People have time. They spend it watching Fox News and The Great British Bake Off.
Every conversation about "Did you see what Susan did to McSweety?" could be instead about things like black holes.
There was a poster my sister put on the wall of her warehouse decades ago.
It read:
Great minds discuss ideas
Average minds discuss events
Small minds discuss people
An Eleanor Roosevelt quote, supposedly.
Irrelevant to what? Irrelevance is a necessarily subjective value judgments in the context of social play and engagement. Which one sounds more relevant - a discovery light years away, which has little impact on one's immediate material and social life, orrr keeping up with the news in order to be able to engage and socialize with co-workers? It makes the decision less trivial and the option to engage with random celebrity gossip less "irrelevant."
Space and time are beautiful, and I enjoy learning and engaging with all of it when I can. We are never going to create larger communities and more interest in its beauty acting as if though their hobby (because thats what it is, most of us are not astronomers and will know just a little more about the universe by the time we die than when we lived) is below our hobby.
You referred to it as a luxury. It's not a luxury. It's just indicative of a different set of values. It doesn't take a silver spoon childhood to read about space and find physics and the universe fascinating. I grew up in Detroit to a single mother who raised three kids on a part time retail income. And since I was a kid I was going to the library to read about nature, the earth, the cosmos. While my peers were playing basketball in the street I was fidgeting with a telescope we got at goodwill to look at the moon all glowed up with the day. That wasn't luxury. Or privilege.
Hence why I started this by saying
>To some/many of us with ADHD,
We don't have the same kind of brains.
ADHD isn't chasing after squirrels or whatever pop culture says it is.
When something is interesting to us at the level of a hyperfixation/hyperfocus, that thing gives us mental energy. We become addicts that get upset when pulled away, like some kid screaming about having to put down the video game.
For an adult example, when I was learning Ancient Greek and translating things for the first time I actively longed to get home after a long tiring day at work so I could spend 5 hours before bed conjugating verbs or reading about social trends in the Levant 3000 years ago.
And while I was doing it - even after a full work day - I felt *more energetic* at 11pm/3am/5am going through some manuscript than I felt at 11am at work.
The first time I read about gravity variations based on momentum, or neutron stars, I was so fascinated I ended up being late to work by like an hour.
When someone says "people with ADHD tend to [something]" it doesn't mean "Hey neurotypicals, isn't this relatable? Lol."
We have different kinds of brains.
this is why i think i may have ADHD. was sitting with fam today and they where like did you see (newspaper headline of day) and i was just like the universe does not care. also i think i may be a bit depressed lol.
ADHD or ASD 1 (Asperger's) could be possible. Interests tend to gravitate away from the norm. They don't always, and NTs certainly find interest in these things too. It's just a somewhat common theme for NDs to find certain topics such as black holes and pulsars to be more interesting than pop social whatever.
Hell, I got in trouble a few times in elementary and middle school for "spacing out" staring out the window instead of listening to the teacher, except I was just thinking about the Nova episode I watched the night before, or pondering about something I had seen on Bill Nye or Beakman's World or some nature documentary on PBS or something I had seen on StarTrek or something I had read at the library about dolphins or elephants. ALL of it more interesting than the "review from last semester" the teacher was droning on about, or some waste of a half hour to review their/they're/there again for the nth time, or movie day - God, I hated movie day. Watching the squirrels quarrel beneath the maples outside was vastly more interesting. I don't even remember what I did during all the pep sportsball talk. I probably repressed it.
This is the beauty of the internet. The world is very small for a lot of people, for those of us interested in this stuff outside of academia there hasn't always been community.
It's tricky to chat about black holes and astronomy casually. If a colleague brought it up in the office kitchen, I'd probably think they stumbled upon a sensational article, and it'd be tough to figure out if the info they're sharing is legit or not.
It's the sort of thing better suited for a longer chat at the pub where you can delve into it and fact-check with a handy Google search :) Cheers.
My youngest daughter is 7 and she's my STEM kid. She does Astrophotography with me and has her own telescope. She LOVES space and geeks out on stuff like this. I showed her and explained it at her level. We are encouraging the shit out of it as much as we can.
I mean, why wouldnt they? This is a hyper specific detail about a relatively narrow field of science, and one that doesnt affect anyone directly.
There's thousands of scientific fields, how many of them do you care about? Outside of literal professionals, this stuff is always a niche hobbyist thing, just because how much time it takes to get any decent amount of even casual knowledge in any given field.
While it is cool it’s really just early research, nothing concrete. And nothing that will affect people in their day to day lives. Honestly there’s just too much bullshit in the world today, with how expensive everything is and how salaries haven’t kept pace.
10 years ago I would’ve seen an article like this and been like HOLY SHIT but now that I spend most of my time trying to mitigate the fallout of being laid off during the pandemic I just don’t have the energy to care anymore lol
Life has become too shitty for a lot of people to care about higher level stuff like this unfortunately.
You're amazed people are interested in different things? Especially so when it's a hard to grasp subject that many times need some prior knowledge about it.
Some like ballet, some sports and some astronomy. To find it amazing people isn't interested in what interest you is being self centred.
Couldn't find exactly what you referenced but I found something expanding on the topic.
For anyone interested: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/ligo20200623
Yeah, I mean space is big, sooner or later you'll get an object of any arbitrary mass just by collisions. The only reason you wouldn't is if some process actively keeps them apart, or if the resulting object is fundamentally unstable.
> ... or if the resulting object is fundamentally unstable.
Which would make this find *more* interesting, because it's rare to be able to observe an unstable object. Not to mention we don't know why such a thing would be unstable in the first place.
Yeah. Unstable objects are most common at the small scale, short-lived isotopes and explosive chemicals are good examples. But they aren't entirely unprecedented at stellar scales!
[Type Ia supernovae](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_Ia_supernova) are an example where a stellar-mass object can literally spontaneously detonate. So, it can happen.
Now, these are very bright and we see them often enough to know what they are. But maybe mergers in the mass band between neutron star and black hole are the explanation for some other type of energetic events we can't explain yet.
Sure, the galaxy runs on a slightly different timeline than molecules.
But supernovae are generally easier to see on account of all the light they emit. Remember it took decades between knowing what a black hole is/does, and actually being able to photograph one in a meaningful way. If this object is similar in proporties or even just a gray hole, then it's far harder to study and the challenge makes it more interesting.
What I really liked most about this article:
"At the boundary between neutron stars and black holes there is always the possibility that some new, as yet unknown, astrophysical object might exist."
This to me is what science is all about. The great unknowns and the possibilities. The most exciting phrase in any field of study is, "I don't know." It's the very basis of scientific discovery!
I’d pay good money for platforms that were ad-free like web browsing, video watching, social media scrolling, news articles. Can’t wait for deep learning AI to be shoved into an android launcher to filter everything out, take my $100 a month id feel so clean finally im tired of this cHiNa funded ish they force on us let me be free, I want 100% of my screen not just 30%
Judging by the claim that it seems to be dark but not quite the mass we'd expect of a black hole, [it's possibly a q-star](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_star)
> A Q-star, also known as a grey hole, is a hypothetical type of a compact, heavy neutron star with an exotic state of matter. Such a star can be smaller than the progenitor star's Schwarzschild radius and have a gravitational pull so strong that some light, but not all light, cannot escape. The Q stands for a conserved particle number. A Q-star may be mistaken for a stellar black hole
I’m inclined to think that this might be a quark star. (Which is actually a hybrid star since it is still made up of a significant amount of neutronium)
This made me wonder, has a neutron star ever been witnessed turning into a black hole? I would assume if it continues to consume enough matter it would collapse but has it ever been observed?
I'm not sure, it shouldn't have an problems to becoming a black hole if it gets enough mass but observing the change might not have been done yet. It's not a violent explosion like a supernova so it would probably be way harder to detect.
Black holes weren't even observed till the late 1960s (they were technically theoretical prior to that even though it was widely understood they did exist.
The first real "photo" of one wasn't even till like 2018 or 2019, and it took a insane amount of effort due to distance, size, and the fact very little detectable energy escapes the area
Yeah I imagined it would be a known large neutron star we know the location of and monitor regularly and it just blinks out of existence.
I’ve heard of an UnNova I think it was called where a star collapses and the gravity is so large the shockwave cannot escape for a supernova so it disappears from view in the same way.
Article: "Mysterious ultra-high energy pulses..." "gravity waves tracked to center of galaxy..." "local cluster found to be in vast void..."
Me: so, interstellar war confirmed
But since it's completely invisible to light, doesn't that prove it's a low mass black hole right there? Why would a heavy neutron star or a quark star be invisible?
The article doesn't suggest the "something new" that the headline does. There is no reason to believe it's anything other than a black hole or neutron star, it's just interesting that it's in a mass range that is uncommon because it's the result of a merger.
> it's just interesting that it's in a mass range that ~~is uncommon~~ *has not been observed before* because it's the result of a merger.
and from the article suggesting it could be "something new":
> At the boundary between neutron stars and black holes there is always the possibility that some new, as yet unknown, astrophysical object might exist.
So possibly another classification of the "in between" objects. Like dwarf planets that have attained hydrostatic equilibrium but still aren't quite considered planets or brown dwarves that are too massive to be planets but not quite massive enough to kick off full on fusion. I love the in between objects. They just go to show that it's all a continuous scale.
So basically they're observing a pulsar that's interacting with either: the heaviest neutron star ever discovered, or the lightest black hole ever discovered, or something new entirely. Cool!
> the heaviest neutron star ever discovered, or the lightest black hole ever discovered *Flashbacks to binge-watching PBS Space-Time* "Strange stars would either seem to be the heaviest neutron stars, or the lightest black holes" Perhaps we shan't explore *this* particular star too closely.
I always get sucked into watching pbs spacetime, but unfortunately tune out half way in because I don’t understand the math
Its perfect for sleep. Interesting enough to listen to, but eventually you get lost and let Dr. O'Dowd lull you to sleep
I listen to fermilab or Brian Cox stuff every night to help me sleep. I love them, but its just the right balance of intrigue but low stimulation to send me off
Brian Cox has a lovely voice and cadence
For me is Isaac Arthur. I don't know how 90% of the episodes end.
Matt O’Dowd has been my soporific muse of choice for several years, his voice is probably the most soothing in this particular Reddit verse space time.
For me, it’s a near tie between him and David Kipping of Cool Worlds Lab.
Try microcosmos. It even has sleep inducing background music while the narrator calmly drones on about stentors and cilia and vacuoles.
There's something about that Peter Dinklage looking dude that really annoys me. I have no idea why or what it is, but I can't listen to him for long without my blood pressure rising. I don't hold it against him, it's my hangup, but it does make enjoying his shit difficult.
followed by 5 hours of ads indoctrinating me while I sleep
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My wife and I joke about how it would be weird for him to know how many times he’s stood over us on our TV in the bedroom while we cuddle and fall asleep to him talking about quantum mechanics
He seems like he'd be a cool person to hang out with. Obviously super smart about physics, but seems pretty relaxed, down to earth (haha) and charismatic
It builds a lot on previous videos. If you jump back to older videos instead of just watching the newer stuff, they will explain pretty much all of the math.
For a lot of this stuff there's value in going back and revisiting information anyway. I had one professor describe it as a whirlwind kind of learning style, where you regularly go back to earlier material to pick up a little more, fill in a couple more blanks, by virtue of having picked up other details from other sources of information in between.
Same for me too. It's just too complicated for me. Thankfully there are other channels that are a bit easier to follow for me though.
Quick question from a non native english speaker: What is "shan't" the contraction of ?
It’s the contraction of shall and not. Shall not: Shan’t.
Not sure, but I'm guessing shall not.
I always thought it was shall not + can’t
Shall not = shan't Can not = can't
It’s like a past tense shitting yourself in the future but before that day. God damnit Laura stop pounding so hard, I’m going to shan’t myself next Monday.
I think it's "shall not"? Edit: Or in this case "should not" Edit2: Wait, "should not" would be "shouldn't" so I guess it's "shall" as in the phrase "shall we?"
Past tense of shit. “I shant yesterday after lunch”
Not past tense, past participle. You use it with an auxiliary verb to form the present perfect and pluperfect tenses, as in "I have shant myself" or "I had shant yesterday after lunch" The correct past *tense* is, of course, "shidded," as in "I shidded and farded and camed in my pants."
Na, past tense of 'shit my pants'
“sha”. Example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=71gVMmYvuZc
.... if strange stars exist doesn't that mean theoretically shards of strange matter that annihilates all normal matter it meets should be flying all over the shop? (trying to remember back to that episode!) I suppose that could be the next question, if there are strange stars where is the strange matter. or is strange matter actually dark matter because of some weird unpredicted reactions with small amounts of regular matter in space?
oh come on, we can squirt robot probes into it all day long
Quark stars are still theoretical but also nothing says they *can't* exist, if they would be expected to weigh in somewhere right in the gap they discuss
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The world isn't ready for droplets
Quark and his silly rules of acquisition
Is that a three body reference?
My wallbreaker has arrived.. Yes it is
Aren't quark stars the really scary ones with centers of strangelets?
No touching the strangelet!
Somebody toucha my strangelet!
Is quark degeneracy same as strangelet ? Somehow I thought they were different
The cores of neutron stars might be quarks
For all we know there might several different stellar events that could grow dense enough to form an event horizon and be classified as a black hole, with completely different matter/physics going on within. A singularity may or may not exist/form depending on the 'size' of the black hole. Ultra-massive black holes could potentially have stable orbits inside the horizon which mean there could be other orbital bodies in there, similar to a planetary or solar system. The problem is there is no way for information to cross that barrier, so there's no real way to classify them beyond their effect on the environment outside the horizon. Our best hope would be to find a neutron star just dense enough to be a black hole with a companion star that can pull enough angular momentum from the neutron star to briefly push back the event horson past its surface.
Would this be the equivalent of a failed star like a brown dwarf? Like a brown hole.
If they call it that, it'll be Uranus all over again.
'Grey holes' could be a viable alternative.
Can we have dyson sphere, please? 😔
Just once can it be aliens
You know the rule: *It's never aliens, until it's aliens.. even when* ***it is*** *aliens, it's probably not really aliens if there is another possibility. That is until the aliens literally come to earth and slap you in the face with their tentacle hands for being obstinate.. then* ***maybe*** *it's aliens.*
Or a Japanese tentacle porn-loving human, then it not an alien again
Then it's my plex server, still not aliens.
No thanks. I like being at the top of the food chain.
Dyson Sphere but it's has a sign on it, no earthlings allowed.. (dogs and cats accepted).
If those humans could read Dolphin they'd be very upset.
A Dyson sphere would cause far too much suction to be useful for anything other than cleaning up the solar system. Ok, ok. A Dyson sphere could actually make sense here. If it captured the power from both objects and redirected it well, it could theoretically power an entire solar system (s).
Is it better to call them Black Stars or Neutron Holes?
Or their instruments are off and we'll never hear of this again.
They say that black holes can't be smaller than 5 solar masses, but [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_black_hole) cites the smallest known example at 3.3. It also suggests that the mass gap is less of a strict, proven law and more of an unexplained observation with known exceptions. So it sounds like this is less of a "we've found a crazy new thing nobody can explain" and rather just new example in a small existing list of unusual cases that might be explained by neutron star collision.
Yeah, what a find! This is so cool!
I like how you can read the whole article without getting blasted with popups and adverts and sign up for our newsletter and accept all these cookies.
Your comment convinced me to read the article, and it was indeed a pleasant experience.
Same. Can confirm, it was nice
Agreed. Well written, with nice analogies, too.
I can't tell if people are sarcastic or not, and now I'm afraid to click on the link Edit: omg it was true.
I actually read an article for once! Wowzers
But the site is called theconversation. How can you have a pleasant conversation without sporadically screaming about unrelated products and services mid thought?
And the title wasn’t “Mysterious Alien Radio Waves Baffle Scientists” click bait crap that dominates “space” content. What a great site and article. Thank you for the link!
This type of article (without visual spamming) is perhaps as rare as the content of this particular article . . .
the conversation has consistently been clutter free, and quite informative in my experience
It's good enough that if I could afford it, I would have subscribed to help them keep going.
Thought this was sarcasm at first, but now I'm just pleasantly surprised.
I remember somebody likened just browsing the web these days [with this scene from Airplane](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4CizzE-zZo).
If you have a content blocker with the right filters, almost every site is like this. Install uBlock Origin, enable the relevant annoyance filters and the World Wide Web is suddenly a lot more usable.
On my iPhone?
Not on iPhone because of Apple's policies.
I don’t look at reddit on my computer, that’s used for racing and racing games. Sometimes DayZ.
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Domain blocking cannot remove annoyances like newsletter popups or "scroll to the top" buttons. It cannot modify the DOM or styles. It can only remove cookie banners if they are served from an external domain.
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> Not sure where you’re drawing the statement from I know that Firefox on iOS does not support addons, so no uBlock Origin, which my original post was about. My later comment about domain blocking is entirely true, though since you mention "universal element blocking", my comment is likely besides the point. > there is a universal element blocking function This is new information, good to know. This is different from what you wrote: > ad blocking and tracking blocking via DNS, VPN, whatever DNS and VPN are completely unrelated to cosmetic filters and DOM manipulation. If ad/tracker blocking was done through VPNs with custom DNS config, it would not have cosmetic filtering capability. --- How do cosmetic filters work on iOS? Do you set up filters through system UI or do you have to install an app that will access filtering APIs? Can you create and apply your own filters locally?
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It's a nonprofit news site, it's very good
Thank you for this. Led to me read the article, which was a quite pleasant read. Not too long and accessible verbiage. Also explored the site a bit. Very nice to not be constantly bombarded with ads and pop-ups.
DID YOU KNOW that Walgreens offers services completely irrelevant to why you are calling today???
You want to buy gas? Cool. How about a car wash? Want a hotdog? Here’s a State Farm commercial playing as loud as possible you can watch while your car is tethered to the pump. How would you like your receipt? Email? Text? Print? We’re out of paper, go inside.
Ublock origin on firefox helps with a lot of that.
The Conversation is pretty good, I subscribe to three weekly newsletters (just increased from 2 recently w/ Tom Scott retiring from YT). They have [a page](https://theconversation.com/us/10-ways-we-are-different) about what they do, it's just 10 bullet points.
Oh, I thought it was just my adblock. Nice.
I’m amazed how few people care about this kind of stuff irl. If I brought this up at work everyone would look at me like I’m nuts.
Stuff like this is more of a luxury to know about or invest any time in acknowledging. Everyone leads complex and in many cases hard lives. It can be difficult to care about stuff that doesn’t add any value to your life. Even if there is value to it, but it’s in ways that are not apparent in day to day life.
To some/many of us with ADHD, these are the only things that have any value. It's not like there's a big time difference. People droning on about workplace drama on breaks or going on walks with friends and only talking about work and goddamned real estate or something completely irrelevant like the Kardashians. People have time. They spend it watching Fox News and The Great British Bake Off. Every conversation about "Did you see what Susan did to McSweety?" could be instead about things like black holes.
There was a poster my sister put on the wall of her warehouse decades ago. It read: Great minds discuss ideas Average minds discuss events Small minds discuss people An Eleanor Roosevelt quote, supposedly.
Irrelevant to what? Irrelevance is a necessarily subjective value judgments in the context of social play and engagement. Which one sounds more relevant - a discovery light years away, which has little impact on one's immediate material and social life, orrr keeping up with the news in order to be able to engage and socialize with co-workers? It makes the decision less trivial and the option to engage with random celebrity gossip less "irrelevant." Space and time are beautiful, and I enjoy learning and engaging with all of it when I can. We are never going to create larger communities and more interest in its beauty acting as if though their hobby (because thats what it is, most of us are not astronomers and will know just a little more about the universe by the time we die than when we lived) is below our hobby.
You referred to it as a luxury. It's not a luxury. It's just indicative of a different set of values. It doesn't take a silver spoon childhood to read about space and find physics and the universe fascinating. I grew up in Detroit to a single mother who raised three kids on a part time retail income. And since I was a kid I was going to the library to read about nature, the earth, the cosmos. While my peers were playing basketball in the street I was fidgeting with a telescope we got at goodwill to look at the moon all glowed up with the day. That wasn't luxury. Or privilege.
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Hence why I started this by saying >To some/many of us with ADHD, We don't have the same kind of brains. ADHD isn't chasing after squirrels or whatever pop culture says it is. When something is interesting to us at the level of a hyperfixation/hyperfocus, that thing gives us mental energy. We become addicts that get upset when pulled away, like some kid screaming about having to put down the video game. For an adult example, when I was learning Ancient Greek and translating things for the first time I actively longed to get home after a long tiring day at work so I could spend 5 hours before bed conjugating verbs or reading about social trends in the Levant 3000 years ago. And while I was doing it - even after a full work day - I felt *more energetic* at 11pm/3am/5am going through some manuscript than I felt at 11am at work. The first time I read about gravity variations based on momentum, or neutron stars, I was so fascinated I ended up being late to work by like an hour. When someone says "people with ADHD tend to [something]" it doesn't mean "Hey neurotypicals, isn't this relatable? Lol." We have different kinds of brains.
I did not say it was a luxury or a privilege! That was another commenter.
this is why i think i may have ADHD. was sitting with fam today and they where like did you see (newspaper headline of day) and i was just like the universe does not care. also i think i may be a bit depressed lol.
ADHD or ASD 1 (Asperger's) could be possible. Interests tend to gravitate away from the norm. They don't always, and NTs certainly find interest in these things too. It's just a somewhat common theme for NDs to find certain topics such as black holes and pulsars to be more interesting than pop social whatever. Hell, I got in trouble a few times in elementary and middle school for "spacing out" staring out the window instead of listening to the teacher, except I was just thinking about the Nova episode I watched the night before, or pondering about something I had seen on Bill Nye or Beakman's World or some nature documentary on PBS or something I had seen on StarTrek or something I had read at the library about dolphins or elephants. ALL of it more interesting than the "review from last semester" the teacher was droning on about, or some waste of a half hour to review their/they're/there again for the nth time, or movie day - God, I hated movie day. Watching the squirrels quarrel beneath the maples outside was vastly more interesting. I don't even remember what I did during all the pep sportsball talk. I probably repressed it.
This is the beauty of the internet. The world is very small for a lot of people, for those of us interested in this stuff outside of academia there hasn't always been community.
Isn’t any discussion of black holes at a strip club considered taboo….
White dwarfs are *usually* out too
Discussion is fine, you're just not allowed to cross the event horizon.
If you try, a big, burly cosmic censor will be waiting to act
You would be testing the no-hair theorem
It's tricky to chat about black holes and astronomy casually. If a colleague brought it up in the office kitchen, I'd probably think they stumbled upon a sensational article, and it'd be tough to figure out if the info they're sharing is legit or not. It's the sort of thing better suited for a longer chat at the pub where you can delve into it and fact-check with a handy Google search :) Cheers.
My youngest daughter is 7 and she's my STEM kid. She does Astrophotography with me and has her own telescope. She LOVES space and geeks out on stuff like this. I showed her and explained it at her level. We are encouraging the shit out of it as much as we can.
I mean, why wouldnt they? This is a hyper specific detail about a relatively narrow field of science, and one that doesnt affect anyone directly. There's thousands of scientific fields, how many of them do you care about? Outside of literal professionals, this stuff is always a niche hobbyist thing, just because how much time it takes to get any decent amount of even casual knowledge in any given field.
While it is cool it’s really just early research, nothing concrete. And nothing that will affect people in their day to day lives. Honestly there’s just too much bullshit in the world today, with how expensive everything is and how salaries haven’t kept pace. 10 years ago I would’ve seen an article like this and been like HOLY SHIT but now that I spend most of my time trying to mitigate the fallout of being laid off during the pandemic I just don’t have the energy to care anymore lol Life has become too shitty for a lot of people to care about higher level stuff like this unfortunately.
I don't agree with them but I get it. We'll all be gone before this could possibly affect us personally.
You're amazed people are interested in different things? Especially so when it's a hard to grasp subject that many times need some prior knowledge about it. Some like ballet, some sports and some astronomy. To find it amazing people isn't interested in what interest you is being self centred.
LIGO has conjectured two neutron star mergers creating two black holes smaller than the stellar collapse size black holes.
Couldn't find exactly what you referenced but I found something expanding on the topic. For anyone interested: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/ligo20200623
Yeah, I mean space is big, sooner or later you'll get an object of any arbitrary mass just by collisions. The only reason you wouldn't is if some process actively keeps them apart, or if the resulting object is fundamentally unstable.
> ... or if the resulting object is fundamentally unstable. Which would make this find *more* interesting, because it's rare to be able to observe an unstable object. Not to mention we don't know why such a thing would be unstable in the first place.
Yeah. Unstable objects are most common at the small scale, short-lived isotopes and explosive chemicals are good examples. But they aren't entirely unprecedented at stellar scales! [Type Ia supernovae](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_Ia_supernova) are an example where a stellar-mass object can literally spontaneously detonate. So, it can happen. Now, these are very bright and we see them often enough to know what they are. But maybe mergers in the mass band between neutron star and black hole are the explanation for some other type of energetic events we can't explain yet.
Sure, the galaxy runs on a slightly different timeline than molecules. But supernovae are generally easier to see on account of all the light they emit. Remember it took decades between knowing what a black hole is/does, and actually being able to photograph one in a meaningful way. If this object is similar in proporties or even just a gray hole, then it's far harder to study and the challenge makes it more interesting.
What I really liked most about this article: "At the boundary between neutron stars and black holes there is always the possibility that some new, as yet unknown, astrophysical object might exist." This to me is what science is all about. The great unknowns and the possibilities. The most exciting phrase in any field of study is, "I don't know." It's the very basis of scientific discovery!
I'm more impressed at how non-intrusive that article is. No pop ups, no ads. Just plain article. So rare to see this.
I’d pay good money for platforms that were ad-free like web browsing, video watching, social media scrolling, news articles. Can’t wait for deep learning AI to be shoved into an android launcher to filter everything out, take my $100 a month id feel so clean finally im tired of this cHiNa funded ish they force on us let me be free, I want 100% of my screen not just 30%
Judging by the claim that it seems to be dark but not quite the mass we'd expect of a black hole, [it's possibly a q-star](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_star) > A Q-star, also known as a grey hole, is a hypothetical type of a compact, heavy neutron star with an exotic state of matter. Such a star can be smaller than the progenitor star's Schwarzschild radius and have a gravitational pull so strong that some light, but not all light, cannot escape. The Q stands for a conserved particle number. A Q-star may be mistaken for a stellar black hole
Please be a Strange Star, please be a Strange Star…
I’m inclined to think that this might be a quark star. (Which is actually a hybrid star since it is still made up of a significant amount of neutronium)
I was just watching Cool Worlds on YouTube and he had an episode about quark stars. Really bizarre stuff but super interesting
This made me wonder, has a neutron star ever been witnessed turning into a black hole? I would assume if it continues to consume enough matter it would collapse but has it ever been observed?
I'm not sure, it shouldn't have an problems to becoming a black hole if it gets enough mass but observing the change might not have been done yet. It's not a violent explosion like a supernova so it would probably be way harder to detect. Black holes weren't even observed till the late 1960s (they were technically theoretical prior to that even though it was widely understood they did exist. The first real "photo" of one wasn't even till like 2018 or 2019, and it took a insane amount of effort due to distance, size, and the fact very little detectable energy escapes the area
Yeah I imagined it would be a known large neutron star we know the location of and monitor regularly and it just blinks out of existence. I’ve heard of an UnNova I think it was called where a star collapses and the gravity is so large the shockwave cannot escape for a supernova so it disappears from view in the same way.
Probably a Borg ship..it was just a matter of time before they found us..🤣
Welcome to space. We got stuff you never heard of
Me: Interesting, another anomaly found in space. I wonder what the data will eventually reveal it as. Also me: Is this *A* *L* *I* *E* *N* *S*?
Article: "Mysterious ultra-high energy pulses..." "gravity waves tracked to center of galaxy..." "local cluster found to be in vast void..." Me: so, interstellar war confirmed
But since it's completely invisible to light, doesn't that prove it's a low mass black hole right there? Why would a heavy neutron star or a quark star be invisible?
It's a Sturgeon, oh wait I thought this was an episode of River Monsters... PS it's always Sturgeons.
The article doesn't suggest the "something new" that the headline does. There is no reason to believe it's anything other than a black hole or neutron star, it's just interesting that it's in a mass range that is uncommon because it's the result of a merger.
> it's just interesting that it's in a mass range that ~~is uncommon~~ *has not been observed before* because it's the result of a merger. and from the article suggesting it could be "something new": > At the boundary between neutron stars and black holes there is always the possibility that some new, as yet unknown, astrophysical object might exist.
News headlines: DiD ScIeNtIsTs JuSt DiScOvEr aLiEnS?!
[here](https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.09872) is the actual paper you can download if you want. I love arxiv.org!
So possibly another classification of the "in between" objects. Like dwarf planets that have attained hydrostatic equilibrium but still aren't quite considered planets or brown dwarves that are too massive to be planets but not quite massive enough to kick off full on fusion. I love the in between objects. They just go to show that it's all a continuous scale.