Neutron Stars are real!

[WeComeInPeace]

We all fear getting too close to a neutron star, but I've always been fascinated by the Crab Pulsar. I've even tried to take a photo of it IRL. The other day I visited the Crab Nebula and gazed for a long time at the pulsar. I got quite close to it, but being ~7000 ly from home, I chickened out at about 5.8 Mm from the star and turned the ship around.

Today I went back. I turned up the graphics quality to max and started heading towards the star. At 5 Mm I slowed down to 30 km/s in SC until I jumped out, ending at 600 km from the star! I'd never been that close to a neutron star before, but insanity drove me on. I started flying slowly towards the star. At 270 km I hit the exclusion zone. The heat was building up while approaching the star, but it went from 25% to 51% in the last 100 km. Hitting the exclusion zone only resulted in the ship being reversed as much as I tried going forward, and I took no damage at all. How 'bout that!

The star is very bright when you get that close, as you can see in the image below. The light in VR was almost blindingly bright, making it hard to read the instruments.

Pulsars / neutron stars are "tiny". Roughly the size of Manhattan. They used to be enormous stars. An atom is mostly made out of empty space. A rough comparison is that if you scaled up the hydrogen atom to the size of a football stadium, the atomic core would be the size of the ball. When a star runs out of fuel it collapses under its own mass. If the star is big enough it will collapse into a black hole. If it's smaller (~1.1-2 solar masses), it collapses into a neutron star. It sort of resembles that all the emptiness in the atoms are squeezed out of the star, ending up with neutrons lying "shoulder to shoulder" like marbles in a glass. This makes a neutron star extremely dense. If you had one teaspoon of neutron star material, it would weigh in at about 900 times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza! Neutron stars are also very hot, with a surface temperature of ~100 times that of the Sun. As seen in the image above they create of a lot of radiation, but I managed to get a few shots of the star itself, and after some heavy color correction in dedicated astro photo software ended up with this image, being the most detailed image of a neutron star (in ED) I've seen so far:

(Close up, crop)

The image shows some interesting features. The horisontal line is caused by flare in the camera. The slanted vertical lines are the jets.

Certainly not the last neutron star I have imaged! All this is normally hidden in the light from the star, but as always the attention to detail in ED is astonishing.

 

[Orvidius]

I'm really hoping that at some point Fdev might consider turning a few of these into magnetars, with destructive effects. Getting up close will become additionally interesting!

 

[Rudi Raumkraut]

This closeup is awesome!

What are these two dots!?

 

[ECLIP5E]

Awesome pics, I’ve often wondered about getting close but I’ve always been worried about getting caught in the jets and overheating. o7

 

[WeComeInPeace]

This closeup is awesome!

What are these two dots!?

Thanks I don't know what the dots are. Might be stars warped by the strong gravity of the NS. Probably not. At first I thought they were rays from the star being additively rendered on top of the star, but if you try and draw a line through the two dots it does not go through the center of the NS. I think more data is necessary.

The image is heavily gamma corrected to even see anything. The NS itself is very small in the original shot:

Here is a raw unmodified full ress crop of the area containing the NS. I've had to store it as jpg, but with "100% compression". Feel free to see if there are any more strange details in there, and if you find something exciting, please share:

(click image for full ress version)

 

[Soron Silin]

There was a guy a while ago who streamed an approach to a ringed neutron star and an attempt to core mine at the exclusion zone. When he pulled out of the ring far enough to de-sync with the rotation the rocks were going crazy fast.

I wonder if you could stack screen-shots to get more detail.

 

[Friedenreich Xante]

Nice shot commander!

 

[WeComeInPeace]

There was a guy a while ago who streamed an approach to a ringed neutron star and an attempt to core mine at the exclusion zone. When he pulled out of the ring far enough to de-sync with the rotation the rocks were going crazy fast.

I wonder if you could stack screen-shots to get more detail.

I recently read that the exclusion zone around the NS had been reduced. Maybe it's a bug, but I thought it might be worth a try to see how close I could get. When you do "slip mining" in ED you find a two ringed planet. Then you aim for the edge of one of the rings facing towards the other ring. Once you're out of SC you will be gravitationally locked by the ring you enter. Next you fly (boost-boost) towards the other ring. When you get to that, you'll see that all the rocks are moving at very high speed, since you're still locked to the first ring. If you get too close, your ship will be destroyed instantly, which might be why I find slip mining exciting. It is considered an exploit by some CMDRs, but it's not more prosperous than normal core mining, so I think Fdev accept it without saying too much about it. Also there's the "blaze your own trail" thing, and since you don't do anything else than flying in-game, I personally don't consider it an exploit. Be warned. It's dangerous, and will send you to a rebuy screen sooner or later

I've tried stacking images of nebulae, but you need to relog for every sub frame you capture. The nebulae are rendered once you enter the system, causing the same render artifacts to appear in all subs. With the NS it's different, because it changes while you observe it. The Crab Pulsar even has a lot of gas surrounding it, being lit by the star and being blown away rapidly. Therefore I believe stacking is impossible. It will just cause the stacked image to become blurry.

 

[Soron Silin]

There doesn't seem to be any worthwhile data in blue light and very little in green. This is just the red channel:

It might be worth trying a red filter with your astro-photography package. I'm down to pixels here and your picture is much smoother.

In green light I think the only information is artifacts... unless this is a secret space-station.

In blue light there's nothing.

 

[WeComeInPeace]

There doesn't seem to be...

PixInsight?

I'm going to try to find some more NS later and see if I can get some more data. Also it might be worthwhile trying to play with the Gamma setting in ED, to see if there is more information hidden in the blue channel.

 

[marx]

That's pretty impressive. Frontier could also have just done it as a simple sphere and be done with it quick. Given the same examination as you did, that would look quite different from these results, no?

 

[WeComeInPeace]

That's pretty impressive. Frontier could also have just done it as a simple sphere and be done with it quick. Given the same examination as you did, that would look quite different from these results, no?

Yes. The NS in ED are probably not intended to be visible, and I think most of what you see in the image is due to the background simulation making interesting artifacts. As far as I know, a NS is an almost perfect sphere, due to the extreme density. They are known to have "quakes" but we don't know the mechanism behind that. Also, the coronal loops seen in the image are somewhat unlikely, given the extreme gravity on the surface of the star.

On the other hand, nobody has been able to image a NS IRL. The only stars that has been imaged with a resulution higher than a single pixel (and surrounding glow) are Betelgeuse, and the Sun.

Edit: Images of the actual RL Crab Pulsar show the solar winds, but the star in the image is not visible as more than the dot:

You can of course see the pulsar in

I found this old screenshot from ED, that shows a much more detailed NS. Maybe it was an early sketch of something never realized. It looks pretty cool though:

 

[Orvidius]

My suspicion is that the ED neutron stars probably look like regular blue/white stars if you can get close enough, since they're probably re-using the same surface animations. But of course there's no way to see for sure, currently.

 

[Friedenreich Xante]

My suspicion is that the ED neutron stars probably look like regular blue/white stars if you can get close enough, since they're probably re-using the same surface animations. But of course there's no way to see for sure, currently.

Due to the nature of neutron stars, I highly doubt there are actually solar eruptions taking place on their surface, but couldn't find any source confirming this. But yeah, that would then be a scaled-down blue star.

 

[ChipStar65]

Neutron stars likely sweep up sufficient gas and dust from their surrounds (which are supernova remnants, remember) to cause highly energetic surface reactions as the matter is shredded to subatomic levels, and their strong magnetic forces would keep at least some of this plasma trapped in prominence-like structures, at least for a time. Polar jets of NSs are fueled by such accreted matter.

I do wonder if NSs (and the white swarfs as well) are as bright in optical wavelengths as portrayed in these images from ED. They produce prodigious amounts of higher-energy EM radiation (UV & gamma), but that wouldn't be visible unless special sensors are used. Lower wavelengths like infrared and microwave would be emitted from accretion disc friction heating and magnetic disturbances, but again, invisible. Anyone seen a NS spectrograph, to check peak emission specs?

 

[Soron Silin]

I do wonder if NSs (and the white swarfs as well) are as bright in optical wavelengths as portrayed in these images from ED. They produce prodigious amounts of higher-energy EM radiation (UV & gamma), but that wouldn't be visible unless special sensors are used. Lower wavelengths like infrared and microwave would be emitted from accretion disc friction heating and magnetic disturbances, but again, invisible. Anyone seen a NS spectrograph, to check peak emission specs?

We can see neutron stars and white dwarfs in the night sky, so their visual magnitude is well-known and they are fairly bright. Our ships and vehicles are ridiculously well shielded from radiation of many sorts. We seem to have invented perfect shielding and insulation some time in the last thousand years.

Someone should work out what the IR flux levels are at a star's exclusion zone. I think it would probably be terrifying.

 

[ChipStar65]

We can see neutron stars and white dwarfs in the night sky, so their visual magnitude is well-known and they are fairly bright.

Better check that info, as most NSs are quite low magnitude in visible light:
"Because neutron stars are so small, they have a low luminosity and even the closest isolated neutron stars appear to be very faint. Geminga @ 160pc is 26th magnitude. Optical spectra of neutron stars should show a black-body curve with a peak around 3Å, but effects from synchrotron radiation and/or ion cyclotron resonance contribute significantly. "
A 3Å (three angstroms) peak is in the range of medium-energy X-rays, which means visible wavelengths would be significantly fainter given a standard black-body distribution. Recall that the Crab pulsar, a rather iconic object, was discovered not by its visual emissions (it is one of only a few known optical pulsars) but because of its radio emissions. Granted that ED gets ships really up close and personal, I still wonder if their portrayed visual intensity is somewhat exaggerated.

 

[Soron Silin]

Better check that info, as most NSs are quite low magnitude in visible light:
"Because neutron stars are so small, they have a low luminosity and even the closest isolated neutron stars appear to be very faint. Geminga @ 160pc is 26th magnitude. Optical spectra of neutron stars should show a black-body curve with a peak around 3Å, but effects from synchrotron radiation and/or ion cyclotron resonance contribute significantly. "
A 3Å (three angstroms) peak is in the range of medium-energy X-rays, which means visible wavelengths would be significantly fainter given a standard black-body distribution. Recall that the Crab pulsar, a rather iconic object, was discovered not by its visual emissions (it is one of only a few known optical pulsars) but because of its radio emissions. Granted that ED gets ships really up close and personal, I still wonder if their portrayed visual intensity is somewhat exaggerated.

I was wrong; we can't see neutron stars from Earth. That's not surprising since they are over 3000ly away. However we can see white dwarfs and I can calculate the numbers.

Sirius B has a luminosity of 0.0295. A luminosity of 1 corresponds to a total output (in the EM spectrum) of 3.828E+026 watts. That means Sirius B puts out 1.12926E+025 watts.
At 270km, you are on the surface of a sphere with a surface area of 916,088,417,787 sq m. The luminosity is spread equally over that, so the incident flux is 12,326,976,065,566 watts per square metre. If an average ship presents a 100 sq m profile, then it has to cope with 1.2petawatts of incoming radiation in the EM spectrum alone.

Spoiler

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That's rather more than some light alloys and heat-sinks could cope with.

It will need a mathematician to do similar calculations for normal stars, because they can't be assumed to be point sources.

I'm not learning all the stuff to turn apparent magnitude into luminosity now, but we seem to have all the necessary information to take a guess at similar figures for Geminga.

 

[Orvidius]

Due to the nature of neutron stars, I highly doubt there are actually solar eruptions taking place on their surface, but couldn't find any source confirming this. But yeah, that would then be a scaled-down blue star.

Oh yeah, I wasn't suggesting it was correct to represent them that way, only that FDev probably did so.

 

[ChipStar65]

... it has to cope with 13.7 gigawatts of incoming radiation in the EM spectrum alone.

"alone"? What other spectrum is there? . In any case, I'm speaking solely of the visual spectrum, which is only a small slice of all that incident radiation. The image above showing the ships & large prominences looks more like what I would expect, bright but not so intense as to completely swamp any detail.