3 ms·

May I propose: There is (A) a neutron star and (B) another dense object, a neutron star or a black hole, and the two have an electrostatic potential between th

• db48x 10y ago
  You may propose it, but wild guesses don't really help. The space of all possible ideas is far too vast for a random guess to have any chance of hitting on a physically plausible idea, let alone the correct idea. I'm no physicist myself, but in this case I suspect that a net electric charge of that magnitude would discharge continuously, because the electric field would be large enough to accelerate charged matter away from the surface. You may have noticed that even our sun produces a continuous solar wind made of charged particles. It's losing a billion kilograms per second, and it has no overall net charge.
  • graycat 10y ago
    Wild guesses are nearly always junk, but some of the best physics looked like wild guesses before lots of testing. I didn't get into just how an object could have a net electric charge, but IIRC such a state is accepted as possible in astrophysics. For the FRB being not continuous but only intermittent, maybe the orbit is not perfectly circular; maybe there are other effects that make the FRB intermittent. Science does not start with a testable hypothesis but with intuitive guesses; the more solid stuff comes later. In this case, for these FRBs, we know so little that doing solid science has to wait and all of us can guess!