3 ms·
Wikipedia mentions a life span of about 10 million years. If they slow down in a predictable way (exponentially?), navigation system could just calculate that i
by blauditore 9y ago
Wikipedia 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.