So, there's a new heavier neutron star that has been found.
Here's a question: How close can we physically get to it while still keeping most of the atoms in our body intact? We seem to be OK at 3000 light years. Would we be fine at 10 light years, 1 light year, 5000 miles? I suppose if we figure out a few things, we are ready to head straight to the nearest neutron star.
Year 3000, package tour to PSR J1614-2230, spins at 317 a second, come come and have a go yourself! Things the tour company has to sort out: the enormous gravitational attraction and the fact that this is a rapidly rotating field that would tear you apart into a gazillion pieces, radiation that would blow the stuff we are composed of.
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All that matters, in the real world, is that something is both massive and compact enough so that, within a certain radius, light cannot escape from it. That is the astrophysical definition of a black hole.
There is a beautiful pulsar paper coming out in Nature tomorrow, 28th of October issue (Demorest et al 467, 1081, 2010)
Several
"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." -Werner Heisenberg