4 ms·
How quickly, on an astronomical scale, do pulsars slow down? I'd imagine that eventually the changes in rotation would throw off the positioning, and require r
by samfriedman 9y ago
How quickly, on an astronomical scale, do pulsars slow down? I'd imagine that eventually the changes in rotation would throw off the positioning, and require recalibration. And of course eventually they'll stop being useful altogether.
One would hope a civilization is able to create artificial pulsars by that time, however...
- blauditore 9y agoWikipedia mentions a life span of about 10 million years. If they slow down in a predictable way (exponentially?), navigation system could just calculate that in. And when some pulsars die out, new one have probably emerged in the meantime, allowing a smart-enough system to gradually switch sources.
- planteen 9y agoThe M1 (Crab Nebula) pulsar slows by 38 ns per day. But it is very new, less than 1000 years old. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_Pulsar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_Pulsar
- extrapickles 9y agoThats almost 1.6ns/hour. If you have a stable oscillator you can compare them to compute the time/date.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nerfhammer 9y agoWouldn't it depend on what happens to show up in the accretion disk? Including the life cycle of any companion stars? I would imagine that it's normally stable but less predictable perturbations can't be strictly ruled out.