4 ms·
The skater is a small human sized object. They pull their arms in, don't honestly shrink much, but they still spin appreciably faster. When you go from somethin
by jdiff 2y ago
The skater is a small human sized object. They pull their arms in, don't honestly shrink much, but they still spin appreciably faster. When you go from something the size of a pre-collapse star and compare it to the size of a neutron star, the speed up factor is way higher. It doesn't matter how slowly you're spinning when big, you will be spinning fast when you get small as all that angular momentum must be conserved.
- kstrauser 2y agoI understand that bit, but it's proportional to the shrinkage. If star A is spinning at X turns per unit time, and identical star B is spinning at 4X turns per the same unit time, and they both collapse to the same size neutron star, tiny A' should be spinning at 4X the turns per unit time as little B'. If the observations in the article are correct, then this neutron star is spinning around 1/10,000th as fast as some others. Neutron star weirdness aside - and that's a whole awful lot of weirdness to set aside - I think that'd mean its earlier version was spinning about 1/10,000th as fast as others. What I don't know, again, as a layman, is whether that's especially unusual or unexpected. Could it be that instead we're looking at its pole, and the pole has an axial precession of an hour while the little fellow's equator is spinning around quickly?
- sandworm101 2y agoOr that it has slowed down. Maybe two objects with opposite rotations merged, then collapsed into a neutron star?
- pavel_lishin 2y agoI thought that the flashes we see from pulsars were entirely due to the axial precession.
- ravetcofx 2y agoI think you're onto something as earth has precessions of 25,000 years...