3 ms·
>“An atom can only scatter a photon if it can absorb the force of its kick, by moving to another chair,” explains Ketterle, invoking the arena seating analogy.
by trhway 5y ago
>“An atom can only scatter a photon if it can absorb the force of its kick, by moving to another chair,” explains Ketterle, invoking the arena seating analogy. “If all other chairs are occupied, it no longer has the ability to absorb the kick and scatter the photon. So, the atoms become transparent.”
by that logic neutron stars should be highly transparent/invisible too.
- datameta 5y agoThe difference being that neutron stars can revolve tens or hundreds of times a second and have a surface temperature of ~600K degrees.
- NickNameNick 5y agoMaybe? But wouldn't you expect at least some non-degenerate matter on the surface of a neutron star? I doubt we'll find any 'naked' neutron stars.
- mr_toad 5y ago> by that logic neutron stars should be highly transparent Neutron stars aren’t uniformly crushed to the limit where they couldn’t interact with photons. That would be the point at which they’d be on the verge of collapsing into a black hole, and photon scattering would be irrelevant.
- tsimionescu 5y agoPerhaps the core of the neutron star, but light would have to reach there first, through the many layers of less dense matter above, right?
- denton-scratch 5y agoI think a neutron star is fully degenerate; effectively it's all core. It's not made of atoms; it's more like a huge atomic nucleus. It's much more dense than the "super-dense" gas these researchers are playing with. A newly-formed neutron star should contain about as much heat as the stellar core that collapsed to form it, but in a much smaller space; so I'd expect it to be super-hot. WP says it's temperature is around 600,000K. So rather than becoming transparent, I'd guess that a neutron star would be super-reflective. It's surface is ultra-smooth, and I can't see a photon getting far into a neutron star without encountering a neutron. Newly-formed neutron stars lose heat very quickly, but they do that by emitting huge numbers of neutrinos, not photons.
- ninjanomnom 5y agoNeutron stars have an atmosphere and layers like any other [1] . Very strange and theoretical ones to be sure, but one of the more entertaining. 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pasta https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pasta
- denton-scratch 5y agoHmm. A farfale phase? (butterflies) Perhaps a chonchiglie phase? Made of the hardest substance in the universe? Mmm - tasty. Thanks - I knew neutron stars had some kind of "atmosphere", but I didn't realise they had layers and interlayers. [Edit] I didn't even realise that NSs had protons in them. I thought protons all degenerated into electrons and neutrons. I have new stuff to learn about - I knew NSs were about the weirdest places anywhere, but they're weirder than I thought.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]