Twitter Physics

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Aatish Bhatia, neutron star facts, physics

I was milling through my Twitter feed when I happened upon a number of interesting physics tweets from Aatish Bhatia. Being that these neutron star facts were in the same vein as my Science Fact of the Day posts, I figured I’d share them with you.

1. 

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   Umd

   Wed, Nov 21 2012 15:22:51

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2. A neutron star is so dense that one teaspoon (5 ml) of it would weigh 900 times as much as the Great Pyramid of Giza. 1/8

   — Aatish Bhatia (@aatishb)
   a day ago

3. This is as if the mass of a Boeing 747 was squished to the size of a grain of sand, or the human population to the size of a sugar cube. 2/8

   — Aatish Bhatia (@aatishb)
   a day ago
4. This one was particularly fascinating:

   The density of a neutron star is such that it curves light enough for you to see more than half of its surface at a time.

   

5. Neutron stars are so dense, they bend their own light. If you look at one, you’ll see more than half its surface! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Neutronstar_2Rs.svg 3/8

   — Aatish Bhatia (@aatishb)
   a day ago

6. The resulting gravity is so strong that if you drop a tennis ball from one meter, it would hit the surface in a millionth of a second. 4/8

   — Aatish Bhatia (@aatishb)
   a day ago

7. That poor tennis ball would hit the surface of the neutron star at 2000 kilometers per SECOND, or 7.2 million kilometers per hour. 5/8

   — Aatish Bhatia (@aatishb)
   a day ago

8. The most rapidly rotating neutron star currently known spins 716 times every second. It weighs two Suns, and would easily fit over NYC. 6/8

   — Aatish Bhatia (@aatishb)
   a day ago

9. That means that the equator of this 32-kilometer-wide neutron star is spinning at one quarter the speed of light. 7/8

   — Aatish Bhatia (@aatishb)
   a day ago

10. If you managed to spend a year down here (don’t try it), you’d be 11 days younger than your twin sibling, thanks to time dilation. 8/8

    — Aatish Bhatia (@aatishb)
    a day ago

11. Aatish Bhatia is a physics grad student and science writer published in Open Lab 2012. He’s also a kayaker, runner, and voider of warranties. He’s been peed on by a proboscis monkey in Borneo.He hails from NJ, USA and you can find more of him here:

    http://www.empiricalzeal.com