Wrong about neutron star

[rstephen@cswnet.com (Roger A. Stephenson)]

Hello all,

Yea, maybe I was wrong. Neutron stars might not  emit nutron radiation, but
don't they release huge amounts of x-ray radiation?

Try this on for size:
>Copyright 1995 by Grolier Publishing, Inc.

A neutron star is an extremely small, high-density star composed of tightly
packed neutrons.  The existence of neutron stars was first postulated in
1932, when the Soviet physicist Lev Landau suggested that a state of matter
stable only at high densities might exist .  In 1934, Walter Baade and
Fritz Zwicky suggested that a SUPERNOVA explosion might leave a remnant in
the form of a star consisting largely of neutrons, the stable state
envisaged by Landau.  In 1968 it was suggested that pulsars , the first of
which had been discovered in 1967, were actually rotating neutron stars;
this theory is now widely accepted.  The short period and the regularity of
the pulses suggested a small, massive star of the kind predicted by theory.
Neutron stars have masses of about one solar mass and radii of about 10 km
.  Their mean densities are thought to be about 10 to the power of 14 times
that of water.

Neutron stars are believed to have a solid crust, perhaps consisting of
crystalline iron.  Inside this crust there is probably a neutron-rich solid
shell, and still deeper inside there is probably a superfluid material.
The sudden slight changes that neutron stars show in their rotation period
are thought to be caused by small, sudden changes in the star's structure.

Because of their identification with pulsars, rotating neutron stars are
thought to have extremely strong magnetic fields on the order of (10 to the
power of 12) gauss (compared to a field of 0.2 gauss on Earth, and a few
thousand gauss in sunspots). This field must be involved in the radiation
of the radio waves from pulsars, but exactly how this occurs is not yet
understood.

As the neutron star rotates and a magnetic pole comes into view, observers
see a bright pulse of X-ray emission. X-ray binary pulsars produce very
regular pulsations that have periods of seconds to minutes. <

While the existance of Nemesis is a question mark, and a big one, if indeed
it were to be a neutron star I'd have to say it would be bad to be alive
when it came around.

Roger A. Stephenson
rstephen@cswnet.com