Tue Apr 08, 2003 5:18 pm by Kaleban
Not to disparage the amature physicists in here, but please don't post something that you "heard from a friend" or are just speculating and call it fact.
Neutron stars are the remains of stars with a stellar mass greater than 1.4 solar masses (1 solar mass = our sun). I do not remember the threshold for black holes, but I believe its somewhere around >3 solar masses.
A star's final or terminal phase is dependent on several factors, primarily its original mass. Then its affected by how much "blowoff" occurs during red giant and or nova/supernova phases. Blowoff is the term used to describe a sun jetting out its mass in the form of plasma, for example solar flares are a blowoff of immense proportions.
Some astrophysicists believe that pulsars are in fact extremely fast spinning neutron stars. Due to their high relative velocity and immense density, whenever their magnetic field comes in contact with matter in space, it sublimates it into energy (basically boosting the solid matter or gas into energy by acceleration) which gives off bright flashes off gamma and x rays. So to answer your original question, what is damaging your ship are high-energy gamma rays. Although, if they're getting through "shields" they would have fried the pilot long before your ship explodes.
Black holes are an entirely crazy subject unto themselves. They've never been directly observed, since they emit no light. Most astrophysicists agree that certain cosmic phenomena, such as the dual gamma flare phenomenon could be attributed to black holes. However, most people who discuss black holes on forums base their facts on artist's renderings of what they MIGHT look like, and are not actually PhDs themselves. One thing I find ammusing is that people tend to think of the event horizon as a disk, when in fact it would be a sphere or donut shape due to the massive warping of space-time caused by the gravity field. The basic anatomy of a black hole is this:
Singularity (the non-dimensional point about which all the mass of the black hole is collected)
Event Horizon (the circumference based on mass where nothing can acheive the escape velocity needed to get away from the black hole)
Corona (the mathematical edge of the event horizon where matter entering can sometimes emit photons prior to dropping past the point of no return)
Scientists have postulated about the existence of naked singularities in which for some odd reason, no gravity exists, that 96% of the universe is composed of unidentified dark matter, and even that black holes are "closed" wormholes (due to high gravity) that allow passage to another dimension. After all, if black holes exist, where does all the matter go that they accumulate? Many black holes tend to shrink over time, and since matter nor energy cannot escape their gravity, it has to go somewhere (i.e. matter cannot be created nor destroyed, merely changed in form).
Some food for thought at least.
Oh and the red giant thing. Yes, most suns (including ours) go through a red giant phase at the end of their lifecycles. However, what happens is that instead of being a rather solid makeup of plasma, the red giant becomes mostly gaseous, blowing off the atmospheres of the inner planets. It does not, however add the planets masses to its own when it contracts, since the contracting mass is mostly gas and there's not enough gravity to overcome the planet's orbits. In fact, what is most likely to happen in our system is that the inner planets are blown outwards out of their orbits, becoming rogue stellar masses. Jupiter and beyond are most likely unaffected during this phase, but once the star becomes a white dwarf, there won't be enough gravity to hold the outer planets in orbit and they too become rogue.
Edited by - Kaleban on 08-04-2003 18:37:14
