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Neutrons Become Cubes Inside Neutron Stars
- inpoortaste 15y agoMakes me think of the rectangles from 2001 Space Odyssey
- Someone 15y agoI do not understand most of that paper, and probably never will, but can someone explain why they propose cubes? If I take a crate of tennis balls, and compress it, I expect the balls to first (more or less) form a densest sphere packing, and from there, I expect they will start to deform to look like truncated octahedrons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitruncated_cubic_honeycomb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitruncated_cubic_honeycomb) Those may be cubic, but it aren't cubes. Also, since there is no unique densest sphere packing, it would not surprise me if variations on this are possible (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_packing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_packing).
- pavel_lishin 15y agoRandom question for astrophysicists who might see this - what would neutronium actually look like? As I understand it, color and reflection is all due to interactions with an atom's electrons - and neutronium has none.