Pulsars are neutron stars. Unbelievable facts from space The interior of neutron stars

>

A pulsar can be seen in the center of galaxy M82 (pink)

Explore pulsars and neutron stars Universe: description and characteristics with photos and videos, structure, rotation, density, composition, mass, temperature, search.

Pulsars

Pulsars are spherical compact objects, the dimensions of which do not go beyond the boundaries of a large city. Surprisingly, with such a volume, they surpass solar in terms of massiveness. They are used to study extreme states of matter, detect planets outside our system and measure cosmic distances. In addition, they helped find gravitational waves that indicate energetic events like supermassive collisions. First discovered in 1967.

What is a pulsar?

If you look out for a pulsar in the sky, it looks like an ordinary twinkling star following a certain rhythm. In fact, their light does not flicker or pulsate, and they do not act as stars.

The pulsar emits two persistent narrow beams of light in opposite directions. The flickering effect is created due to the fact that they rotate (beacon principle). At this moment, the beam hits the Earth, and then turns again. Why is this happening? The point is that the light beam of a pulsar is usually not aligned with its axis of rotation.

If the blinking is created by rotation, then the speed of the pulses reflects that with which the pulsar is rotating. A total of 2000 pulsars were found, most of which make one revolution per second. But there are about 200 objects that manage to make a hundred revolutions in the same time. The fastest are called millisecond, because their number of revolutions per second is equal to 700.

Pulsars cannot be considered stars, at least not "living". Rather, they are neutron stars that form after a massive star runs out of fuel and collapses. As a result, a strong explosion is created - a supernova, and the remaining dense material is transformed into a neutron star.

The diameter of pulsars in the Universe reaches 20-24 km, and the mass is twice that of the Sun. For your understanding, a piece of such an object the size of a sugar cube would weigh 1 billion tons. That is, something weighing the size of Everest is placed in your hand! True, there is an even denser object - a black hole. The most massive reaches 2.04 solar masses.

Pulsars have a strong magnetic field that is 100 million to 1 quadrillion times stronger than Earth's. For a neutron star to emit pulsar-like light, it must have the correct ratio of magnetic field strength to rotational speed. It so happens that a beam of radio waves may not pass through the field of view of a ground-based telescope and remain invisible.

Radio pulsars

Astrophysicist Anton Biryukov on the physics of neutron stars, rotation deceleration and the discovery of gravitational waves:

Why do pulsars rotate?

The slowness for a pulsar is one rotation per second. The fastest ones accelerate to hundreds of revolutions per second and are called millisecond. The process of rotation occurs because the stars from which they were formed also rotated. But to get to that speed, you need an additional source.

Researchers believe that millisecond pulsars formed by stealing energy from a neighbor. You can notice the presence of a foreign substance that increases the speed of rotation. And this is not very good for an injured companion, which may one day be completely absorbed by the pulsar. Such systems are called black widows (after the dangerous species of spider).

Pulsars are capable of emitting light at several wavelengths (from radio to gamma rays). But how do they do it? Scientists cannot yet find an exact answer. It is believed that a separate mechanism is responsible for each wavelength. Lighthouse beams are composed of radio waves. They are bright and narrow and resemble coherent light, where the particles form a focused beam.

The faster the rotation, the weaker the magnetic field. But the speed of rotation is sufficient for them to emit the same bright rays as slow ones.

During rotation, the magnetic field creates an electric field, which is able to bring the charged particles into a mobile state (electric current). The area above the surface where the magnetic field dominates is called the magnetosphere. Here charged particles are accelerated to incredibly high speeds due to the strong electric field. At each acceleration, they emit light. It is displayed in the optical and X-ray range.

What about gamma rays? Research suggests that their source should be sought elsewhere near the pulsar. And they will resemble a fan.

Search for pulsars

Radio telescopes remain the main method for searching for pulsars in space. They are small and faint compared to other objects, so you have to scan the entire sky and gradually these objects get into the lens. Most were found with the help of the Parks Observatory in Australia. A lot of new data will be available from the Quadrant Kilometer Antenna Array (SKA) starting in 2018.

In 2008, the GLAST telescope was launched, which found 2050 gamma-emitting pulsars, of which 93 were millisecond. This telescope is incredibly useful as it scans the entire sky, while others highlight only small areas along the plane.

Finding different wavelengths can be problematic. The fact is that radio waves are incredibly powerful, but they may simply not hit the telescope lens. But gamma rays spread over more of the sky, but are inferior in brightness.

Scientists now know about the existence of 2,300 pulsars found by radio waves and 160 by gamma rays. There are also 240 millisecond pulsars, of which 60 emit gamma rays.

Using pulsars

Pulsars are not only amazing space objects, but also useful tools. The light emitted can tell a lot about internal processes. That is, researchers are able to understand the physics of neutron stars. The pressure in these objects is so high that the behavior of matter differs from the usual. The strange stuffing of neutron stars is called "nuclear paste."

Pulsars are very useful because of the accuracy of the pulses. Scientists know specific objects and perceive them as a cosmic clock. This is how conjectures about the existence of other planets began to appear. In fact, the first exoplanet found orbited a pulsar.

Do not forget that pulsars continue to move during the "blinking", which means that they can be used to measure cosmic distances. They were also involved in testing Einstein's theory of relativity, such as moments with gravity. But the regularity of the pulsation can be disrupted by gravitational waves. This was noticed in February 2016.

Pulsar cemeteries

All pulsars gradually slow down. The radiation is powered by a magnetic field created by rotation. As a result, it also loses its power and stops sending beams. Scientists have drawn a special line where gamma rays can still be detected in front of radio waves. As soon as the pulsar sinks below it, it is decommissioned to the pulsar cemetery.

If a pulsar was formed from supernova remnants, then it has a huge energy reserve and a fast rotation speed. Examples include the young object PSR B0531 + 21. In such a phase, it can stay for several hundred thousand years, after which it will begin to lose speed. Middle-aged pulsars make up the majority of the population and only produce radio waves.

However, a pulsar can extend its life if there is a satellite nearby. Then it will pull out its material and increase its rotation speed. Such changes can occur at any time, so the pulsar is able to revive. Such a contact is called a low-mass X-ray binary system. The oldest pulsars are millisecond. Some are billions of years old.

Neutron stars

Neutron stars - rather mysterious objects exceeding the solar mass by 1.4 times. They are born after the explosion of larger stars. Let's get to know these formations better.

When a star explodes, 4-8 times more massive than the Sun, a core with a high density remains, which continues to collapse. Gravity pushes on the material so hard that it forces protons and electrons to fuse to appear as neutrons. This is how a high-density neutron star is born.

These massive objects are capable of reaching only 20 km in diameter. To make you aware of density, just one spoonful of neutron star material will weigh a billion tons. The gravity on such an object is 2 billion times stronger than Earth's, and the power is enough for gravitational lensing, allowing scientists to see the back of the star.

The thrust from the explosion leaves a momentum that causes the neutron star to rotate, reaching several revolutions per second. Although they can accelerate up to 43,000 times per minute.

Boundary layers near compact objects

Astrophysicist Valery Suleimanov on the formation of accretion disks, stellar wind and matter around neutron stars:

The bowels of neutron stars

Astrophysicist Sergey Popov on the extreme states of matter, the composition of neutron stars and methods for studying the interior:

When a neutron star is part of the binary system where the supernova exploded, the picture is even more dramatic. If the second star was inferior in massiveness to the Sun, then it pulls the companion's mass into the “Roche petal”. It is a spherical cloud of material that revolves around a neutron star. If the satellite was 10 times the solar mass, then the mass transfer is also tuned, but not so stable. The material flows along the magnetic poles, heats up and creates X-ray pulsations.

By 2010, 1,800 pulsars had been found using radio detection and 70 through gamma rays. In some specimens, planets were even noticed.

Types of neutron stars

For some representatives of neutron stars, jets of material flow at almost the speed of light. When they fly past us, they flash like a lighthouse. Because of this, they were nicknamed pulsars.

When X-ray pulsars take material from their more massive neighbors, it comes into contact with a magnetic field and creates powerful beams that can be seen in the radio, X-ray, gamma and optical spectrum. Since the source is located in a companion, they are called accreting pulsars.

Rotating pulsars in the sky obey the rotation of stars because high-energy electrons interact with the pulsar's magnetic field above the poles. As the matter inside the pulsar's magnetosphere accelerates, it causes it to emit gamma rays. The release of energy slows down the rotation.

A beautiful space whirligig may one day destroy the Earth with deadly rays, scientists report.

Unlike the Star Wars Death Star, which needed to get close to the planet in order to detonate it, this sparkling spiral is able to burn worlds thousands of light years away, similar to the Death Galaxy already described on our website.

“I loved this spiral because of its beauty, but now, looking at it, I can't help feeling like I’m peering into the muzzle of a gun,” says researcher Peter Tuthill, an astronomer at the University of Sydney.

In the heart of this fiery cosmic whirligig are two hot, bright stars revolving around each other. In such a mutual rotation, flashes of streaming gas break out from the surface of the stars and collide in intermediate space, gradually intertwining and twisting in the orbits of the stars into rotating spirals.

A sequence of 11 images, superimposed and colored, shows the whirligig formed by the binary star Wolf-Raet 104. The images were taken in the near-infrared range by the Keck telescope. Peter Tuthill, University of Sydney.

Short circuit

Yula, called WR 104, was discovered eight years ago in the constellation Sagittarius. It circulates in a circle “every eight months, with the precision of a cosmic chronometer,” says Tuthill.

Both heavy stars in WR 104 will one day explode as a supernova. However, one of the two stars is an extremely unstable Wolf-Raye star, which is in the last known phase of the life of heavy stars before going supernova.

"Astronomers consider the Wolf-Rae stars to be ticking bombs," Tuthill explains. "This star's 'fuse' is almost - astronomically - blown out, and could explode at any moment over the next several hundred thousand years."

When Wolf-Rae goes supernova, it "could throw a powerful stream of gamma rays in our direction," says Tuthill. "And if such a gamma explosion occurs, we really would not want the Earth to be in its path."

Since the initial blast wave will travel at the speed of light, nothing can warn of its approach.

In the line of fire

Gamma ray bursts are the most powerful explosions known to us in the universe. For a time from a few milliseconds to a minute or more, they can release the same amount of energy as our Sun for all 10 billion years of its existence.

But the most creepy thing about this whirligig is that we see it as a near perfect spiral, according to the latest images from the Keck telescope in Hawaii. “This way we can only see a binary system when we are practically on its axis,” explains Tuthill.

To our greatest regret, the emission of gamma rays occurs directly along the axis of the system. In fact, if a gamma ray burst occurs one day, our planet could be right in the line of fire.

"This is the first object we know of that can release gamma rays at us," said astrophysicist Adrian Melott of the University of Kansas at Laurence, who was not involved in this study. "And the distance to the system is frighteningly close."

Yula is about 8,000 light-years from Earth, about a quarter of the way to the center of the Milky Way galaxy. While this seems like a decent distance, “earlier studies have shown that gamma-ray emissions can be fatal to life on Earth — if we're not lucky enough to get in its way — and at that distance,” Tuthill says.

Possible scenario

Although the whirligig cannot smash the Earth to pieces like the Death Star and Star Wars - at least not from a distance of 8,000 light years - it can lead to mass destruction and even to the complete extinction of life, in the forms we know, on our planet.

Gamma rays will not be able to penetrate the Earth's atmosphere deep enough to burn the soil, but they can chemically alter the stratosphere. According to Melot's calculations, if WR 104 shoots at us with a burst of about 10 seconds, then gamma rays will deprive us of 25 percent of the ozone layer, which protects us from harmful ultraviolet rays. For comparison, human-induced thinning of the ozone layer, which created "ozone holes" over the polar regions, reduced the ozone layer by only 3-4 percent.

“It’s going to be very bad,” Melot says. - Everything will start to die out. The food chain could collapse in the oceans, an agricultural crisis and famine. ”

The release of gamma rays can also lead to the formation of fog that obscures the sun and acid rain. However, the distance of 8,000 years is “too great for the darkening to be noticeable,” says Melot. - I would say, in general, the sunlight will decrease by 1-2 percent. The climate may get a little colder, but it shouldn't come to a catastrophic ice age. "

The danger of cosmic rays

What is unknown about gamma rays is how many particles they spew as cosmic rays.

“Typically, gamma ray bursts are so far away from us that the universe's magnetic fields pull off any cosmic rays we might observe, but if the gamma ray burst was relatively close, all high-energy particles would rush through the galaxy's magnetic field and hit us, - says Melot. - Their energy will be so high that they will arrive almost simultaneously with the light flux. "

“That part of the Earth, which turns out to be facing the stream of gamma rays, will survive something similar to being near a nuclear explosion; All organisms can get sick with radiation sickness, adds Melot. Moreover, cosmic rays can exacerbate the effect of gamma rays on the atmosphere. But we simply do not know how many cosmic rays gamma rays emanate, so we cannot assess the degree of danger. "

It is also unclear how wide the flow of energy released by the burst of gamma rays will be. But in any case, the cone of destruction emanating from the whirligig will reach several hundred square light years before it comes to Earth, according to Melot's calculations. Tuthill, however, states that "no one will be able to fly in a spacecraft far enough not to hit the beam if it really fires in our direction."

Fictional "Death Star" from "Star Wars"

Do not worry

Nevertheless, Tunhill believes that the whirligig may be quite safe for us.

“There are too many uncertainties,” he explains. “Radiation can pass to the side without causing us any harm if we are not exactly on the axis, and besides, no one is completely sure that stars like WR 104 can cause such a powerful burst of gamma radiation. "

Further research should focus on whether WR 104 is actually targeting Earth and examining how supernova births lead to gamma-ray emissions.

Melot and others have also speculated that gamma-ray fluxes could cause mass extinction of species on Earth. But speaking about whether the whirligig is a real threat to us, Melot notes: "I would rather be worried about global warming."

Neutron stars, often referred to as "dead", are astonishing objects. Their study in recent decades has become one of the most exciting and rich in discoveries in astrophysics. Interest in neutron stars is due not only to the mysteriousness of their structure, but also to their colossal density, and the strongest magnetic and gravitational fields. Matter there is in a special state, reminiscent of a huge atomic nucleus, and these conditions cannot be reproduced in terrestrial laboratories.

Birth at the tip of a feather

The discovery in 1932 of a new elementary particle - the neutron made astrophysicists think about what role it can play in the evolution of stars. Two years later, it was suggested that supernova explosions are associated with the transformation of ordinary stars into neutron stars. Then the calculations of the structure and parameters of the latter were carried out, and it became clear that if small stars (such as our Sun) at the end of their evolution turn into white dwarfs, then the heavier ones become neutron. In August 1967, while studying the scintillations of space radio sources, radio astronomers discovered strange signals - very short, about 50 milliseconds long, radio emission pulses were recorded, repeated at a strictly defined time interval (about one second). This was completely unlike the usual chaotic picture of random irregular oscillations of radio emission. After a thorough check of all the equipment, it was confident that the pulses were of extraterrestrial origin. It is difficult to surprise astronomers with objects emitting with variable intensity, but in this case the period was so small and the signals were so regular that scientists seriously suggested that they might be news from extraterrestrial civilizations.

Therefore, the first pulsar was named LGM-1 (from the English Little Green Men - "Little Green Men"), although attempts to find any meaning in the received pulses ended in vain. Soon, 3 more pulsating radio sources were discovered. Their period again turned out to be much less than the characteristic oscillation and rotation times of all known astronomical objects. Due to the pulsed nature of the radiation, new objects were called pulsars. This discovery literally shook astronomy, and many radio observatories began to receive reports of the discovery of pulsars. After the discovery of a pulsar in the Crab Nebula, which arose from a supernova explosion in 1054 (this star was visible during the day, as mentioned in their chronicles by the Chinese, Arabs and North Americans), it became clear that the pulsars are somehow connected with supernova explosions ...

Most likely, the signals came from the object left after the explosion. It took a long time before astrophysicists realized that pulsars were the rapidly rotating neutron stars that they had been looking for for so long.

Crab nebula
The outburst of this supernova (photo above), sparkling in the earth's sky brighter than Venus and visible even during the day, occurred in 1054 Earth clock. Almost 1,000 years is a very short time by cosmic standards, and nevertheless, during this time, the most beautiful Crab Nebula has managed to form from the remnants of an exploded star. This image is a composition of two images: one from the Hubble Space Telescope (shades of red), the other from the Chandra X-ray Telescope (blue). It is clearly seen that high-energy electrons emitting in the X-ray range very quickly lose their energy, so blue colors prevail only in the central part of the nebula.
Combining two images helps to more accurately understand the mechanism of operation of this amazing cosmic generator, which emits electromagnetic oscillations of the widest frequency range - from gamma quanta to radio waves. Although most neutron stars have been detected by radio emission, they still emit most of the energy in the gamma and X-ray ranges. Neutron stars are born very hot, but cool rather quickly, and already at a thousand years of age have a surface temperature of about 1,000,000 K. Therefore, only young neutron stars shine in the X-ray range due to purely thermal radiation.

Pulsar physics
A pulsar is simply a huge magnetized top spinning around an axis that does not coincide with the axis of the magnet. If nothing fell on it and it did not emit anything, then its radio emission would have a rotational frequency and we would never have heard it on Earth. But the fact is that this top has a colossal mass and a high surface temperature, and the rotating magnetic field creates an electric field of enormous intensity, capable of accelerating protons and electrons almost to light speeds. Moreover, all these charged particles flying around the pulsar are trapped in its colossal magnetic field. And only within a small solid angle near the magnetic axis they can break free (neutron stars have the strongest magnetic fields in the Universe, reaching 10 10 -10 14 gauss, for comparison: the earth's field is 1 gauss, the solar field - 10-50 gauss) ... It is these streams of charged particles that are the source of the radio emission from which pulsars were discovered, which later turned out to be neutron stars. Since the magnetic axis of a neutron star does not necessarily coincide with the axis of its rotation, when the star rotates, the flow of radio waves propagates in space like a beacon beam - only for a moment cutting through the surrounding mist.

X-ray images of the Crab Nebula pulsar in active (left) and normal (right) states

Nearest neighbor
This pulsar is located only 450 light years from Earth and is a binary system of a neutron star and a white dwarf with an orbital period of 5.5 days. Soft X-rays received by the ROSAT satellite are emitted from polar caps PSR J0437-4715, hot up to two million degrees. In the process of its rapid rotation (the period of this pulsar is 5.75 milliseconds), it turns to the Earth with one or another magnetic pole, as a result, the intensity of the flux of gamma quanta changes by 33%. A bright object next to a small pulsar is a distant galaxy, which for some reason actively glows in the X-ray part of the spectrum.

Almighty gravity

According to modern evolutionary theory, massive stars end their lives with a colossal explosion, transforming most of them into an expanding gas nebula. As a result, from the giant, many times larger than our Sun in size and mass, there remains a dense hot object about 20 km in size, with a thin atmosphere (made of hydrogen and heavier ions) and a gravitational field 100 billion times larger than Earth's. They called it a neutron star, believing that it consists mainly of neutrons. The substance of a neutron star is the densest form of matter (a teaspoon of such a supernucleus weighs about a billion tons). The very short period of signals emitted by pulsars was the first and most important argument in favor of the fact that these are neutron stars with a huge magnetic field and rotating at a breakneck speed. Only dense and compact objects (only a few tens of kilometers in size) with a powerful gravitational field can withstand such a rotational speed without being scattered to pieces due to centrifugal inertial forces.

A neutron star consists of a neutron liquid with an admixture of protons and electrons. "Nuclear liquid", very much like a substance made from atomic nuclei, is 1014 times denser than ordinary water. This huge difference is understandable - after all, atoms consist mainly of empty space, in which light electrons flutter around a tiny heavy nucleus. The nucleus contains almost all the mass, since protons and neutrons are 2,000 times heavier than electrons. The extreme forces that arise during the formation of a neutron star compress atoms in such a way that electrons pressed into the nuclei combine with protons to form neutrons. Thus, a star is born, almost entirely composed of neutrons. A superdense nuclear liquid, if brought to Earth, would explode like a nuclear bomb, but in a neutron star it is stable due to the tremendous gravitational pressure. However, in the outer layers of a neutron star (as, indeed, of all stars), the pressure and temperature drop, forming a solid crust about a kilometer thick. It is believed to be composed primarily of iron nuclei.

Flash
A colossal X-ray flare on March 5, 1979, it turns out, occurred far beyond our Galaxy, in the Large Magellanic Cloud - a satellite of our Milky Way, located at a distance of 180 thousand light years from Earth. Joint processing of the March 5 gamma-ray burst recorded by seven spacecraft made it possible to accurately determine the position of this object, and the fact that it is located in the Magellanic Cloud is practically beyond doubt today.

It is difficult to imagine an event that happened on this distant star 180 thousand years ago, but it burst out then, like as many as 10 supernovae, more than 10 times higher than the luminosity of all stars in our Galaxy. The bright dot at the top of the figure is the well-known SGR pulsar for a long time, and the irregular outline is the most likely position of the object that erupted on March 5, 1979.

The origin of the neutron star
A supernova is simply a transition of some of the gravitational energy into thermal energy. When the fuel in the old star runs out and the thermonuclear reaction can no longer warm its interior to the required temperature, a kind of collapse occurs - the collapse of the gas cloud to its center of gravity. The energy released during this scatters the outer layers of the star in all directions, forming an expanding nebula. If the star is small, such as our Sun, then an outbreak occurs and a white dwarf is formed. If the mass of the star is more than 10 times that of the Sun, then such a collapse leads to a supernova explosion and an ordinary neutron star is formed. If a supernova breaks out on the site of a very large star, with a mass of 20-40 solar, and a neutron star with a mass greater than three Suns is formed, then the process of gravitational compression becomes irreversible and a black hole is formed.

Internal structure
The hard crust of the outer layers of a neutron star is composed of heavy atomic nuclei arranged in a cubic lattice, with electrons flying freely between them, which resembles Earth's metals, but much denser.

Open question

Although neutron stars have been intensively studied for about three decades, their internal structure is not known for certain. Moreover, there is no firm conviction that they really consist mainly of neutrons. As you move deeper into the star, pressure and density increase and matter can be so compressed that it decays into quarks - the building blocks of protons and neutrons. According to modern quantum chromodynamics, quarks cannot exist in a free state, but are combined into inseparable "threes" and "twos". But, perhaps, at the border of the inner core of a neutron star, the situation is changing and quarks are breaking free from their confinement. To gain a deeper understanding of the nature of the neutron star and exotic quark matter, astronomers need to determine the relationship between the star's mass and its radius (average density). By examining neutron stars with satellites, you can measure their mass quite accurately, but determining the diameter is much more difficult. More recently, scientists, using the capabilities of the XMM-Newton X-ray satellite, have found a way to estimate the density of neutron stars based on gravitational redshift. The unusualness of neutron stars also lies in the fact that as the star's mass decreases, its radius increases - as a result, the most massive neutron stars have the smallest size.

Black Widow
The explosion of a supernova quite often gives a newborn pulsar considerable speed. Such a flying star with a decent magnetic field of its own strongly perturbs the ionized gas that fills interstellar space. A kind of shock wave is formed, running in front of the star and diverging in a wide cone after it. The combined optical (blue-green part) and X-ray (shades of red) images show that here we are dealing not just with a luminous gas cloud, but with a huge flux of elementary particles emitted by this millisecond pulsar. The linear speed of Black Widow is 1 million km / h, it makes a revolution around its axis in 1.6 ms, it is already about a billion years old, and it has a companion star circling around the Widow with a period of 9.2 hours. The pulsar B1957 + 20 got its name for the simple reason that its powerful radiation simply burns its neighbor, forcing the gas that forms it to "boil" and evaporate. The red cigar-shaped cocoon behind the pulsar is where the electrons and protons emitted by the neutron star emit soft gamma rays.

The result of computer modeling makes it possible to very clearly, in section, represent the processes occurring near a rapidly flying pulsar. The rays diverging from a bright point are a conventional image of that flux of radiant energy, as well as the flux of particles and antiparticles, which comes from a neutron star. The red outline on the border of black space around the neutron star and the red glowing clouds of plasma is where the stream of relativistic particles flying at almost the speed of light meets the interstellar gas compacted by the shock wave. By dramatically decelerating, the particles emit X-rays and, having lost the main energy, no longer heat up the incident gas so much.

Convulsions of giants

Pulsars are considered one of the early life stages of a neutron star. Thanks to their study, scientists learned about magnetic fields, and about the speed of rotation, and the further fate of neutron stars. By constantly observing the behavior of a pulsar, one can determine exactly how much energy it loses, how much it slows down, and even when it ceases to exist, slowing down so much that it cannot emit powerful radio waves. These studies have confirmed many of the theoretical predictions about neutron stars.

By 1968, pulsars with a rotation period of 0.033 seconds to 2 seconds were discovered. The frequency of pulses of the radio pulsar is maintained with surprising accuracy, and at first the stability of these signals was higher than the Earth's atomic clock. And yet, with progress in measuring time for many pulsars, it was possible to register regular changes in their periods. Of course, these are extremely small changes, and in only millions of years one can expect a doubling of the period. The ratio of the current rotation rate to the rotation deceleration is one way to estimate the age of a pulsar. Despite the remarkable stability of the radio signal, some pulsars sometimes experience so-called “disturbances”. In a very short time interval (less than 2 minutes), the speed of rotation of the pulsar increases by a significant amount, and then, after a while, returns to the value that was before the "violation". It is believed that the "disturbances" may be caused by the rearrangement of mass within the neutron star. But in any case, the exact mechanism is still unknown.

Thus, the Vela pulsar is subjected to large "disturbances" approximately once every 3 years, and this makes it a very interesting object for studying such phenomena.

Magnetars

Some neutron stars, called SGR, emit powerful bursts of "soft" gamma rays at irregular intervals. The amount of energy emitted by SGR in a typical flare lasting a few tenths of a second can only be emitted by the Sun in a whole year. Four known SGRs are located within our Galaxy and only one is outside it. These incredible bursts of energy can be triggered by starquakes - powerful versions of earthquakes, when the solid surface of neutron stars bursts open and powerful proton streams burst from their depths, which, bogged down in a magnetic field, emit gamma and X-rays. Neutron stars have been identified as sources of powerful gamma-ray bursts after a huge gamma-ray burst on March 5, 1979, when as much energy was ejected in the first second as the Sun emits in 1,000 years. Recent observations of one of the currently most "active" neutron stars appear to support the theory that the irregular, powerful bursts of gamma and X-rays are caused by starquakes.

In 1998, the well-known SGR suddenly woke up from a "slumber", which for 20 years showed no signs of activity and splashed out almost as much energy as the gamma-ray burst on March 5, 1979. Most of all, when observing this event, the researchers were struck by a sharp slowdown in the speed of rotation of the star, which indicates its destruction. To explain the powerful gamma and X-ray flares, a model of a magnetar, a neutron star with a super-strong magnetic field, was proposed. If a neutron star is born spinning very quickly, then the combined effect of rotation and convection, which plays an important role in the first few seconds of a neutron star, can create a huge magnetic field as a result of a complex process known as an "active dynamo" (the same way creates a field inside the Earth and the Sun). Theorists were amazed to discover that such a dynamo, working in a hot, newborn neutron star, could create a magnetic field 10,000 times stronger than ordinary pulsar fields. When the star cools down (after 10 or 20 seconds), convection and dynamo action stop, but this time is quite enough for the necessary field to appear.

The magnetic field of a rotating electrically conducting ball is unstable, and a sharp restructuring of its structure can be accompanied by the release of colossal amounts of energy (a clear example of such instability is the periodic shift of the Earth's magnetic poles). Similar things happen on the Sun in explosive events called "solar flares." In a magnetar, the available magnetic energy is enormous, and this energy is enough to power such giant flares as March 5, 1979 and August 27, 1998. Such events inevitably cause deep breakdown and changes in the structure of not only electric currents in the volume of a neutron star, but also of its solid crust. Another mysterious type of objects that emit powerful X-rays during periodic explosions are the so-called anomalous X-ray pulsars - AXP. They differ from conventional X-ray pulsars in that they emit only in the X-ray range. Scientists believe that SGR and AXP are life phases of the same class of objects, namely magnetars, or neutron stars, which emit soft gamma rays, drawing energy from the magnetic field. And although magnetars today remain the brainchild of theorists and there is not enough data to confirm their existence, astronomers are persistently looking for the necessary evidence.

Magnetar candidates
Astronomers have already studied our home galaxy, the Milky Way, so thoroughly that it costs them nothing to draw its side view, marking the position of the most remarkable of neutron stars.

Scientists believe AXP and SGR are simply two life stages of the same giant magnet - a neutron star. The first 10,000 years, the magnetar is an SGR - a pulsar visible in ordinary light and giving repeated flashes of soft X-rays, and for the next millions of years it, already as the anomalous pulsar AXP, disappears from the visible range and puffs only in X-rays.

Strongest magnet
An analysis of the data obtained by the RXTE (Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, NASA) satellite during observations of the unusual pulsar SGR 1806-20 showed that this source is the most powerful magnet in the universe known to date. The magnitude of its field was determined not only on the basis of indirect data (on the slowing down of the pulsar), but also practically directly - by measuring the frequency of rotation of protons in the magnetic field of a neutron star. The magnetic field near the surface of this magnetar reaches 10 15 gauss. If he were, for example, in the orbit of the Moon, all magnetic media on our Earth would be demagnetized. True, given that its mass is approximately equal to that of the Sun, this would no longer matter, because even if the Earth did not fall on this neutron star, it would spin around it like a madman, making a full revolution in just an hour.

Active dynamo
We all know that energy loves to move from one form to another. Electricity is easily converted into heat, and kinetic energy into potential energy. It turns out that huge convective flows of electrically conducting plasma magma or nuclear matter can also transform their kinetic energy into something unusual, for example, into a magnetic field. Moving large masses on a rotating star in the presence of a small initial magnetic field can lead to electric currents that create a field in the same direction as the original. As a result, an avalanche-like increase in the intrinsic magnetic field of the rotating conductive object begins. The greater the field, the greater the currents, the greater the currents, the greater the field - and all this is due to banal convective flows due to the fact that a hot substance is lighter than a cold one, and therefore floats

Troubled neighborhood

The famous Chandra space observatory has discovered hundreds of objects (including in other galaxies), indicating that not all neutron stars are meant to lead life alone. Such objects are born in binary systems that survived a supernova explosion that created a neutron star. And sometimes it happens that single neutron stars in dense stellar regions such as globular clusters capture a companion. In this case, the neutron star will "steal" matter from its neighbor. And depending on how massive the star will keep her company, this "theft" will cause different consequences. The gas flowing from a companion, with a mass less than that of our Sun, cannot immediately fall on such a "crumb" as a neutron star due to its too large intrinsic angular momentum, so it creates around it a so-called accretion disk of "stolen »Matter. Friction when wrapped around a neutron star and compressed in a gravitational field heats up the gas to millions of degrees, and it begins to emit X-rays. Another interesting phenomenon associated with neutron stars with a low-mass companion is X-ray bursts (bursters). They usually last from a few seconds to several minutes and at their maximum give the star a luminosity almost 100 thousand times that of the Sun.

These flares are explained by the fact that when hydrogen and helium are transferred to a neutron star from a companion, they form a dense layer. Gradually, this layer becomes so dense and hot that the reaction of thermonuclear fusion begins and a huge amount of energy is released. In terms of power, this is equivalent to the explosion of the entire nuclear arsenal of earthlings on every square centimeter of the surface of a neutron star within a minute. A completely different picture is observed if the neutron star has a massive companion. The giant star loses matter in the form of a stellar wind (a stream of ionized gas emanating from its surface), and the huge gravity of the neutron star captures some of this matter. But here the magnetic field comes into its own, which makes the falling matter flow along the lines of force to the magnetic poles.

This means that X-rays are primarily generated in hotspots at the poles, and if the magnetic axis and rotation axis of the star do not coincide, then the star's brightness turns out to be variable - this is also a pulsar, but only an X-ray one. Neutron stars in X-ray pulsars have bright giant stars as companions. In bursters, the companions of neutron stars are low-mass stars, faint in brightness. The age of bright giants does not exceed several tens of millions of years, while the age of faint dwarf stars can be billions of years, since the former consume their nuclear fuel much faster than the latter. It follows that busters are old systems in which the magnetic field has managed to weaken over time, and pulsars are relatively young, and therefore the magnetic fields in them are stronger. Perhaps the busters pulsed at some point in the past, while pulsars have yet to erupt in the future.

Pulsars with the shortest periods (less than 30 milliseconds), the so-called millisecond pulsars, are also associated with binary systems. Despite their rapid rotation, they turn out to be not the youngest, as one would expect, but the oldest.

They arise from binary systems, where an old, slowly rotating neutron star begins to absorb matter from its also already aged companion (usually a red giant). Falling on the surface of a neutron star, matter transfers rotational energy to it, making it spin faster and faster. This happens until the companion of the neutron star, almost freed from excess mass, becomes a white dwarf, and the pulsar comes to life and starts rotating at a speed of hundreds of revolutions per second. However, recently astronomers have discovered a very unusual system, where the companion of a millisecond pulsar is not a white dwarf, but a giant bloated red star. Scientists believe that they are observing this binary system just in the stage of "liberation" of the red star from excess weight and transformation into a white dwarf. If this hypothesis is incorrect, then the companion star could be an ordinary star from a globular cluster, accidentally captured by a pulsar. Almost all neutron stars that are currently known are found either in X-ray binaries or as single pulsars.

And just recently, Hubble noticed a neutron star in visible light, which is not a component of the binary system and does not pulsate in the X-ray and radio range. This provides a unique opportunity to accurately determine its size and make adjustments to the understanding of the composition and structure of this bizarre class of burnt-out stars compressed by gravity. This star was first discovered as an X-ray source and emits in this range not because it collects hydrogen gas as it moves through space, but because it is still young. Perhaps it is the remnant of one of the stars of the binary system. As a result of a supernova explosion, this binary system collapsed and the former neighbors began an independent journey through the universe.

Star Eater Baby
As stones fall to the ground, so a large star, releasing its mass piece by piece, gradually moves to a small and remote neighbor, which has a huge gravitational field near its surface. If the stars did not revolve around a common center of gravity, then the gas jet could simply flow, like a stream of water from a circle, onto a small neutron star. But since the stars are spinning in a circle, the falling matter, before it appears on the surface, must lose most of its angular momentum. And here the mutual friction of particles moving along different trajectories and the interaction of the ionized plasma forming the accretion disk with the pulsar's magnetic field help the process of falling matter to successfully end with an impact on the surface of a neutron star in the region of its magnetic poles.

Riddle 4U2127 Solved
This star has been fooling astronomers for more than 10 years, exhibiting a strange slow variability of its parameters and flashing differently each time. Only the latest research from the Chandra space observatory has made it possible to unravel the mysterious behavior of this object. It turned out that this is not one, but two neutron stars. Moreover, they both have companions - one star, similar to our Sun, the other - to a small blue neighbor. Spatially, these pairs of stars are separated by a fairly large distance and live an independent life. But on the stellar sphere, they are projected almost to one point, which is why they were considered one object for so long. These four stars are located in the globular cluster M15 at a distance of 34 thousand light years.

Open question

In total, astronomers have discovered about 1,200 neutron stars to date. More than 1,000 of them are radio pulsars, and the rest are simply X-ray sources. Over the years of research, scientists have come to the conclusion that neutron stars are real originals. Some are very bright and calm, others are periodically flashing and altered by starquakes, and still others exist in binary systems. These stars are among the most mysterious and elusive astronomical objects, combining the strongest gravitational and magnetic fields and extreme densities and energies. And each new discovery from their turbulent life gives scientists unique information necessary for understanding the nature of Matter and the evolution of the Universe.

Universe standard
It is very difficult to send anything outside the solar system, therefore, together with the spacecraft Pioneer-10 and -11 that went there 30 years ago, the earthlings also sent messages to brothers in mind. Drawing something that would be understandable to the Extraterrestrial Mind is not an easy task, moreover, it was still necessary to indicate the return address and the date of sending the letter ... How intelligibly all this the artists were able to do is difficult for a person to understand, but the very idea of \u200b\u200busing radio pulsars for indicating the place and time of sending the message is brilliant. Intermittent rays of various lengths emanating from the point symbolizing the Sun indicate the direction and distance to the pulsars closest to Earth, and the discontinuous line is nothing more than a binary designation of the period of their revolution. The longest ray points to the center of our Galaxy - the Milky Way. The frequency of the radio signal emitted by the hydrogen atom when the mutual orientation of the spins (direction of rotation) of the proton and the electron changes is taken as a unit of time in the message.

The famous 21 cm or 1420 MHz should be known by all intelligent beings in the Universe. By these landmarks, pointing to the "radio beacons" of the Universe, it will be possible to find earthlings even after many millions of years, and by comparing the recorded pulsar frequency with the current one, it will be possible to estimate when these men and women blessed the first spacecraft that left the solar system.

Nikolay Andreev

33 facts. Famous and not so famous. About planets, about the structure of space, about the human body and deep space. Each fact is accompanied by a large and colorful illustration.

1. Mass of the Sun makes up 99.86% of the mass of the entire solar system, the remaining 0.14% falls on planets and asteroids.

2. Jupiter's magnetic field so powerful that it enriches the magnetic field of our planet with billions of watts every day.

3. The largest pool The solar system, formed by a collision with a space object, is located on Mercury. This is Caloris Basin, with a diameter of 1,550 km. The collision was so strong that the shock wave passed through the entire planet, radically changing its appearance.

4. Solar matter the size of a pinhead, placed in the atmosphere of our planet, will begin to absorb oxygen at an incredible speed and in a split second will destroy all life within a radius of 160 kilometers.

5.1 Plutonian year lasts 248 Earth years. This means that while Pluto makes only one complete revolution around the Sun, the Earth has time to make 248.

6. Even more interesting the situation is with Venus, 1 day on which lasts 243 Earth days, and a year only 225.

7. Martian volcano "Olympus" (Olympus Mons) is the largest in the solar system. Its length is more than 600 km, and the height is 27 km, while the height of the highest point on our planet, the peak of Mount Everest, reaches only 8.5 km.

8. Explosion (flash) of a supernova accompanied by the release of a gigantic amount of energy. In the first 10 seconds, an exploding supernova produces more energy than the Sun in 10 billion years and generates more energy in a short period of time than all the objects in the galaxy combined (excluding other exploding supernovae).

The brightness of such stars easily overshadows the luminosity of the galaxies in which they flashed.

9. Tiny neutron stars, whose diameter does not exceed 10 km, weighs like the Sun (remember fact №1). The force of gravity on these astronomical objects is extremely high and if, hypothetically, an astronaut lands on it, then his body weight will increase by about one million tons.

10.February 5, 1843 astronomers discovered a comet, which was given the name "Great" (aka the March comet, C / 1843 D1 and 1843 I). Flying close to the Earth in March of the same year, it “traced” the sky in two with its tail, the length of which reached 800 million kilometers.

Earthlings watched the tail stretching behind the "Great Comet" for more than a month, until, on April 19, 1843, it completely disappeared from the sky.

11. Warming us Now the energy of the sun's rays originated in the core of the Sun more than 30 million years ago - most of this time it took it to overcome the dense shell of the celestial body and only 8 minutes to reach the surface of our planet.

12. Most heavy elementscontained in your body (such as calcium, iron and carbon) are byproducts of the explosion of a group of supernovae that started the formation of the solar system.

13. Researchers from Harvard University found that 0.67% of all rocks on Earth are of Martian origin.

14. Density The 5.6846 × 1026-kilogram Saturn is so small that if we could put it in water, it would float to the surface itself.

15. On the moon of Jupiter, Io, ~ 400 active volcanoes were recorded. The speed of emissions of sulfur and sulfur dioxide during the eruption can exceed 1 km / s, and the height of the streams can reach 500 kilometers.

16. Contrary to popular In the opinion, space is not a complete vacuum, but it is close enough to it, because there is at least 1 atom per 88 gallons (0.4 m 3) of cosmic matter (and as is often taught in school, in a vacuum there are no atoms or molecules).

17. Venus is the only planet Solar system that turns counterclockwise. There are several theoretical grounds for this. Some astronomers are sure that such a fate befell all planets with a dense atmosphere, which first slows down and then twists the celestial body in the opposite direction from the original rotation, while others suggest that the cause was the fall of a group of large asteroids on the surface of Venus.

18.From the beginning of 1957 (the year of the launch of the first artificial satellite "Sputnik-1") mankind managed to literally seed the orbit of our planet with various satellites, but only one of them was lucky enough to repeat the ‘fate of the Titanic’. In 1993, the European Space Agency's Olympus satellite was destroyed by an asteroid collision.

19. The largest fallen The 2.7 meter "Hoba" found in Namibia is considered a meteorite on Earth. The meteorite weighs 60 tons and is 86% iron, making it the largest naturally occurring piece of iron on Earth.

20. Tiny Pluto considered the coldest planet (planetoid) in the solar system. Its surface is covered with a thick crust of ice, and the temperature drops to - 200 0 C. Ice on Pluto has a completely different structure than on Earth and is several times stronger than steel.

21. Official scientific theory states that a person can survive in outer space without a spacesuit for 90 seconds if they immediately exhale all the air from their lungs.

If a small amount of gases remain in the lungs, they will begin to expand, followed by the formation of air bubbles, which, if released into the blood, will lead to embolism and inevitable death. If the lungs are filled with gases, they will simply burst.

After 10-15 seconds of being in open space, the water in the human body will turn into steam, and the moisture in the mouth and before our eyes will begin to boil. As a result, soft tissues and muscles will swell, leading to complete immobilization.

The most interesting thing is that the next 90 seconds the brain will still live and the heart beat.

In theory, if during the first 90 seconds a loser astronaut who has suffered in open space is placed in a pressure chamber, he will get off with only superficial injuries and a slight fright.

22. The weight of our planet Is a variable quantity. Scientists have found that every year the Earth recovers by ~ 40,160 tons and dumps ~ 96,600 tons, thus losing 56,440 tons.

23. Earth's gravity compresses the human spine, so when an astronaut enters space, he grows about 5.08 cm.

At the same time, his heart contracts, decreases in volume, and begins to pump less blood. It is the body's response to an increase in blood volume, which requires less pressure to circulate normally.

24. In space, tightly compressed metal parts weld spontaneously. This occurs as a result of the absence of oxides on their surfaces, the enrichment of which occurs only in an oxygen-containing medium (the earth's atmosphere can serve as a clear example of such an environment). For this reason, NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) specialists treat all metal parts of spacecraft with oxidizing materials.

25. Between the planet and its satellite the effect of tidal acceleration arises, which is characterized by a slowdown in the rotation of the planet around its own axis and a change in the satellite's orbit. So, every century the Earth's rotation slows down by 0.002 seconds, as a result of which the length of the day on the planet increases by ~ 15 microseconds per year, and the Moon moves away from us by 3.8 centimeters annually.

26. "Space whirligig" called a neutron star, it is the fastest spinning object in the Universe, which makes up to 500 revolutions per second on its axis. In addition, these cosmic bodies are so dense that one tablespoon of their constituent substance will weigh ~ 10 billion tons.

27. Star of Betelgeuse is located 640 light-years from Earth and is the closest candidate to our planetary system for the title of supernova. It is so large that if you place it in the place of the Sun, it will fill the diameter of Saturn's orbit. This star has already gained sufficient mass of 20 Suns for an explosion and, according to some scientists, should explode in the next 2-3 thousand years. At the peak of its explosion, which will last at least two months, the luminosity of Betelgeuse will be 1,050 times higher than that of the sun, making it possible to observe its death from Earth even with the naked eye.

28. The nearest galaxy to us, Andromeda, is located at a distance of 2.52 million years. The Milky Way and Andromeda are moving towards each other at great speeds (the speed of Andromeda is 300 km / s, and the Milky Way is 552 km / s) and will most likely collide in 2.5-3 billion years.

29. In 2011, astronomers discovered a planet made up of 92% ultra-dense crystalline carbon - diamond. The precious celestial body, which is 5 times larger than our planet and heavier than Jupiter, is located in the constellation Serpent, at a distance of 4,000 light years from Earth.

30. The main challenger the habitable planet of the extrasolar system, "Super-Earth" GJ 667Cc, is only 22 light-years from Earth. However, the journey to it will take us 13,878,738,000 years.

31. Orbiting our planet there is a dump of waste from the development of astronautics. More than 370,000 objects weighing from several grams to 15 tons revolve around the Earth at a speed of 9,834 m / s, colliding with each other and scattering into thousands of smaller parts.

32. Every second The sun loses ~ 1 million tons of matter and becomes several billion grams lighter. The reason for this is the stream of ionized particles flowing from its crown, which is called the "solar wind".

33. Over time planetary systems are becoming extremely unstable. This happens as a result of the weakening of the bonds between the planets and stars around which they revolve.

In such systems, the orbits of the planets are constantly shifting and may even intersect, which sooner or later will lead to a collision of planets. But even if this does not happen, then in a few hundred, thousand, million or billion years the planets will move away from their star at such a distance that its gravitational attraction simply cannot keep them, and they will go on a free flight across the galaxy.

Facts known and not so well, about planets, about the structure of space, about the human body and deep space. Each fact is accompanied by a large and colorful illustration.

1. The mass of the Sun is 99.86% of the mass of the entire solar system, the remaining 0.14% falls on planets and asteroids.

2. The magnetic field of Jupiter is so powerful that every day it enriches the magnetic field of our planet with billions of watts.

3. The largest basin of the solar system, formed as a result of a collision with a space object, is located on Mercury. This is Caloris Basin, with a diameter of 1,550 km. The collision was so strong that the shock wave passed through the entire planet, radically changing its appearance.

4. Solar matter the size of a pinhead, placed in the atmosphere of our planet, will begin to absorb oxygen at an incredible speed and in a split second will destroy all life within a radius of 160 kilometers.

5.1 Plutonian year lasts 248 Earth years. This means that while Pluto makes only one complete revolution around the Sun, the Earth has time to make 248.

6. Even more interesting is the situation with Venus, where 1 day lasts 243 Earth days, and a year is only 225.

7. The Martian volcano "Olympus" (Olympus Mons) is the largest in the solar system. Its length is more than 600 km, and the height is 27 km, while the height of the highest point on our planet, the peak of Mount Everest, reaches only 8.5 km.

8. The explosion (flash) of a supernova is accompanied by the release of a gigantic amount of energy. In the first 10 seconds, an exploding supernova produces more energy than the Sun in 10 billion years and generates more energy in a short period of time than all the objects in the galaxy combined (excluding other exploding supernovae). The brightness of such stars easily overshadows the luminosity of the galaxies in which they flashed.

9. Tiny neutron stars, whose diameter does not exceed 10 km, weigh as much as the Sun (remember fact # 1). The force of gravity on these astronomical objects is extremely high and if, hypothetically, an astronaut lands on it, then his body weight will increase by about one million tons.

10. On February 5, 1843, astronomers discovered a comet, which was given the name "Great" (aka the March comet, C / 1843 D1 and 1843 I). Flying close to the Earth in March of the same year, it “traced” the sky in two with its tail, the length of which reached 800 million kilometers. Earthlings watched the tail stretching behind the "Great Comet" for more than a month, until, on April 19, 1983, it completely disappeared from the sky.

11. The energy of the sun's rays that warms us now originated in the core of the Sun more than 30 million years ago - it took most of this time to overcome the dense shell of the celestial body and only 8 minutes to reach the surface of our planet.

12. Most of the heavy elements in your body (such as calcium, iron and carbon) are byproducts of the supernova explosion that started the formation of the solar system.

13. Researchers at Harvard University have found that 0.67% of all rocks on Earth are of Martian origin.

14. The density of the 5.6846 × 1026-kilogram Saturn is so low that if we could place it in water, it would float on the very surface.

15. On the moon of Saturn, Io, ~ 400 active volcanoes are recorded. The speed of emissions of sulfur and sulfur dioxide during the eruption can exceed 1 km / s, and the height of the streams can reach 500 kilometers.

16. Contrary to popular belief, space is not a complete vacuum, but it is close enough to it, because there is at least 1 atom per 88 gallons of cosmic matter (and as we know, there are no atoms or molecules in a vacuum).

17. Venus is the only planet in the solar system that rotates counterclockwise. There are several theoretical grounds for this. Some astronomers are sure that such a fate befell all planets with a dense atmosphere, which first slows down and then twists the celestial body in the opposite direction from the original rotation, while others suggest that the cause was the fall of a group of large asteroids on the surface of Venus.

18. Since the beginning of 1957 (the year of the launch of the first artificial satellite "Sputnik-1"), mankind has literally managed to seed the orbit of our planet with various satellites, but only one of them was lucky enough to repeat the ‘fate of the Titanic’. In 1993, the European Space Agency's Olympus satellite was destroyed by an asteroid collision.

19. The largest meteorite that has fallen to Earth is considered to be the 2.7 meter Hoba discovered in Namibia. The meteorite weighs 60 tons and is 86% iron, making it the largest naturally occurring piece of iron on Earth.

20. Tiny Pluto is considered the coldest planet (planetoid) in the solar system. Its surface is covered with a thick crust of ice, and the temperature drops to -200 0С. Ice on Pluto has a completely different structure than on Earth and is several times stronger than steel.

21. Official scientific theory says that a person can survive in outer space without a spacesuit for 90 seconds if they immediately exhale all the air from their lungs. If a small amount of gases remain in the lungs, they will begin to expand, followed by the formation of air bubbles, which, if released into the blood, will lead to embolism and inevitable death. If the lungs are filled with gases, they will simply burst. After 10-15 seconds of being in open space, the water in the human body will turn into steam, and the moisture in the mouth and before our eyes will begin to boil. As a result, soft tissues and muscles will swell, leading to complete immobilization. This will be followed by loss of vision, icing of the nasal cavity and larynx, blue skin, which in addition will suffer from severe sunburn. The most interesting thing is that the next 90 seconds the brain will still live and the heart beat. In theory, if during the first 90 seconds a loser astronaut who has suffered in open space is placed in a pressure chamber, he will get off with only superficial injuries and a slight fright.

22. The weight of our planet is a variable value. Scientists have found that every year the Earth recovers by ~ 40,160 tons and dumps ~ 96,600 tons, thus losing 56,440 tons.

23. Earth's gravity compresses the human spine, so when an astronaut enters space, he grows about 5.08 cm. At the same time, his heart contracts, decreases in volume, and begins to pump less blood. It is the body's response to an increase in blood volume, which requires less pressure to circulate normally.

24. In space, tightly compressed metal parts are spontaneously welded. This occurs as a result of the absence of oxides on their surfaces, the enrichment of which occurs only in an oxygen-containing medium (the earth's atmosphere can serve as a clear example of such an environment). For this reason, NASA specialists The United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration is an agency owned by the United States federal government, reporting directly to the Vice President of the United States and funded 100% from the state budget, responsible for the civilian space country program. All images and videos captured by NASA and its subsidiaries, including from numerous telescopes and interferometers, are published as public domain and may be freely copied. all metal parts of spacecraft are treated with oxidizing materials.

25. Between the planet and its satellite, the effect of tidal acceleration occurs, which is characterized by a slowdown in the rotation of the planet around its own axis and a change in the satellite's orbit. So, every century the Earth's rotation slows down by 0.002 seconds, as a result of which the length of the day on the planet increases by ~ 15 microseconds per year, and the Moon moves away from us by 3.8 centimeters annually.

26. The 'space whirligig' called a neutron star is the fastest spinning object in the Universe, which makes up to 500 thousand revolutions per second around its axis. In addition, these cosmic bodies are so dense that one tablespoon of their constituent substance will weigh ~ 10 billion tons.

27. The star Betelgeuse is located 640 light years from Earth and is the closest candidate to our planetary system for the title of supernova. It is so large that if you place it in the place of the Sun, it will fill the diameter of Saturn's orbit. This star has already gained sufficient mass of 20 Suns for an explosion and, according to some scientists, should explode in the next 2-3 thousand years. At the peak of its explosion, which will last at least two months, the luminosity of Betelgeuse will be 1,050 times higher than that of the sun, making it possible to observe its death from Earth even with the naked eye.

28. The nearest galaxy to us, Andromeda, is at a distance of 2.52 million years. The Milky Way and Andromeda are moving towards each other at great speeds (the speed of Andromeda is 300 km / s, and the Milky Way is 552 km / s) and will most likely collide in 2.5-3 billion years.

29. In 2011, astronomers discovered a planet made up of 92% ultra-dense crystalline carbon - diamond. The precious celestial body, which is 5 times larger than our planet and heavier than Jupiter, is located in the constellation Serpent, at a distance of 4,000 light years from Earth.

30. The main contender for the title of an inhabited planet outside the solar system, "Super-Earth" GJ 667Cc, is only 22 light-years from Earth. However, the journey to it will take us 13,878,738,000 years.

31. In the orbit of our planet, there is a dump of waste from the development of astronautics. More than 370,000 objects weighing from several grams to 15 tons revolve around the Earth at a speed of 9,834 m / s, colliding with each other and scattering into thousands of smaller parts.

32. Every second the Sun loses ~ 1 million tons of matter and becomes lighter by several billion grams. The reason for this is the stream of ionized particles flowing from its crown, which is called the "solar wind".

33. Over time, planetary systems become extremely unstable. This happens as a result of the weakening of the bonds between the planets and stars around which they revolve. In such systems, the orbits of the planets are constantly shifting and may even intersect, which sooner or later will lead to a collision of planets. But even if this does not happen, then in a few hundred, thousand, million or billion years the planets will move away from their star at such a distance that its gravitational attraction simply cannot keep them, and they will go on a combined flight across the galaxy.

34. The sun makes up 99.8 percent of the mass of the solar system.