Well, I wouldn't say I'd done any 'real' work thinking about this. As I said I work on understanding the radio jets produced from black holes and I once looked into jet production just long enough to realise that it's really hard!



I think so, I seem to remember reading a couple of years back about a theory where once a NS is spun up to such a rate that it starts to be deformed (kHz range) it starts radiating gravitational waves quite strongly, thus limiting its speed and hence is deformation.



I really don't know. Generally of course the NS is going to be bigger than the BH so in my mind I imagine the BH being swallowed by the NS. After that I don't know what to imagine, clearly all hell is about to break loose! The part of the NS closest to the BH is obviously going to be consumed but I suspect that it not all going to fall straight in and you may end up in a supernova like scenario where some of the outer layers falling at close to the speed of light bouncing off other layers causing a massive explosion.

These are the type of questions that we may be able to answer better once gravitational wave antennas are sesitive enough. The most powerful gravitational waves are likely to come from such events and will contain a lot of infomation about the coalescence procedure.

James

Note, I didn't make any ludicrous claims that the structual properties of the crust had anything to do with holding the NS star together as your reply seems to imply.




No, and not only that but the intense magnetic fields would also goven the interior motion over any convection effects even if it wasn't superfluid.



1000 Hz is a little fast, the fastest known pulsar is around 1.5ms I beleve (600 Hz) and note millisecond pulsars are extremly uncommon compared to your average common or garden NS (and probably more massive and hence more stable to disruption)

The thing that makes me think that it would not be disrupted by ths method is that even using your very fast 1khz model you stiil have tens of billions of g's to overcome but not only that you've got to accelerate the matter to escape velocity within (less than) half a revolution else it's going to get to a position where the tidal force vanishes and it will fall back to the surface.



That's my gut feeling also.

However I beleve the final accretion of material onto a BH is extremely complex and all this speculating is rather pointless without some rather complex simulation to back it up. I've done a bit of work in this field looking into jet production (jets are the day job) and it is very poorly understood (The fact that jets are produced at all tells you something complicated is going on!)


James

It works!

Thanks Michael,

Cheers, James

Yup.



No, but my current plans put me nearby around April '07 (landing June '07) only have to adjust my plans slightly!



Shh!

Note that orbits within about 3 Rs are unstable (allthough this can be less in a Kerr (rotating) black hole. So I don't really think we can imagine an orbit with part of the neutron star inside the Event horizon.



Neuton stars are not "extremely solid" on the contrary most of there interior is superfluid. Only the crust is solid which is where the quakes occur, when, as you say the shape of the star changes.



I'm not in a position to think about this much at the moment (a cold is stopping my brain from working!) but my first guess would be that the NS would be consumed pretty much whole. The only other scenario I can think of would be where tidal effects stretch the star so such an extent that gravity is no longer able to hold it together (like as been said above) however I don't think this likley for the following reasons:

1) NS's are really small so you would need one hell of a tidal force in the first place.
2) NS's hold there shape really well, these are objects that can rotate 100's of times per second and still stay together in a roughly sperical shape so an even higher gradient is needed.
3) for this to work the NS would have to be tidally locked to the BH this is hard due to the very good level of symmetry of the NS and the high rotation rate.
4) the NS would have to be fairly close to the lower mass limit which (I think) is probably quite rare.

I just don't think the gravitational gradient is strong enough to do this, even within the last stable orbit of a BH. (Note no calculations done to justify all this, just belef )

James

Will do, thanks Michael,

will be over the weekend however, v-busy today/tomorrow.

James

Here is my first attempt at putting an Oppy pan together - The full Olympia sol 634 pan in colour.

Try as I might I can't get the horizon to quite form one continuous line, Oppy pans seem much harder than Spirit's (I can't get sub-pixel stitching accuracy ) It'll have to do for now though.

It's half resolution to bring it into the realms of attachment size - I'll try and find somewhere to put the full res version tomorrow (when I'm not connecting through dialup). Along with the Spirit East Basin pan that has been requested in the Haskin ridge thread.

James.

Good to see your location images back Alan.

The full res is nice.

I was having problems late last night handling it on my Powerbook so I gave up and reduced it to half res for the final few tweaks so I could get to bed. I'll have another go later.

Glad you liked it,

James

What a picture - roller-coaster indeed - especially as we went down the steep bit in one sol!

After some recent posts in another thread about not advertising this place too much for fear of loons, I wondered just how people had come across this place.

I joined up on the very first day after AlexBlackwell posted an advert in one of the premier kook hangouts: sci.space.history. Luckly it must have pretty much slipped under the radar being new and all, I wouldn't recomend doing that again!

Just curious...

James

I hope so too!

At least it works though. And I can always just leave it running in the background all day on batch mode. Alternately I can always run multiple versions to get it using a bit more of my CPU (further to saying it was using 10% before, I watched it in Activity monitor and most of the time it's at no more than 3%!)

My Mac is technically owned by the university who have an IDL site licence so I might just get the real thing installed and try that. Or just run it at work on Linux. Lots of options it's sure not going to stop me making pans, I've only just got the hang of it!

James

Thanks for the compliments guys.

Now if only I could get MichaelT's AV program to run at full speed, it took 5 hours for it to process the raws for that image.

Here is my attempt at the complete Sol 653 East Basin panorama.

James

Hmm, 5 seconds eh, that's a bit quicker than 5 mins!

Anybody else got this working on a Mac?

How long does this program take to run for you guys?

I got it running on my Mac yesterday but it takes 4 - 5 mins on each raw pancam frame! I know it is a complicated procedure and it's running through a virtual machine so it's not going to be instantaneous but my activity monitor says it's only using about 10% of my CPU.

Just wondering...

James

Here's my attempt at that...



Note this was my first test using MichaelT's anti-vignetting software and its worked really well! I think that was the missing link in my image processing procedure.

Enjoy,

James

Is that really true? It's not responding to commands now.

I thought that is was it was working but wouldn't drive beyond 7 degrees of straight and was therefore not being used in case it really did get stuck and at a less favorable angle.

Worth a test now and again to straighten it those last few degrees I suppose. But I wouldn't bet on any motion apart from that, it's not worth the risk.

James

Thanks, good to have the article translated by a real person!

So the target marker was purposely not sent to land on Itokawa, just to test the release!

I guess as the landing site was deemed to rocky there was no need to, but still, I'm surprised to say the least!

And now were having three rehearsals as well!

What a suprising day!

James

Well, without getting involved in another argument about 'realistic'

My attempt was posted here

That's a great image dilo, unusual geometry, thanks.

I love the ring-shine onto Saturns night side

James

Maybe this means it is not the target marker with the aluminum name (signature ) sheet, although I thought that it was supposed to be on the first one released.

That shadow picture by the way astonishing!

James

Hurrrah!

Venus here we come

From Spaceflightnow.com

0514 GMT (12:14 a.m. EST)

T+plus 1 hour, 41 minutes. By this point in the flight the Fregat should have completed its burn and then released Venus Express. We're awaiting confirmation from ESA that these events have occurred successfully.

Fregat burn should be underway by now.

No word on Spaceflightnow yet...

EDIT: cross posting with you Emily. I feel your pain, I don't know how much more page reloads my computer (and me) can take!