Life on or near a neutron star (speculative hobbies)

https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet...180970510/

EXCERPT: In a recent paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, a research team led by Bettina Posselt from Pennsylvania State University reported an unexplained heat signature around the neutron star RXJ0806.4–4123.

Neutron stars are the collapsed cores of massive stars. Only 10 to 20 kilometers in diameter, they have enormous gravitational and magnetic fields— so strong, in fact, that electrons are ripped from their nuclei, and protons and neutrons come in close proximity. In such a bizarre environment, the strong nuclear force is dominant, not the electromagnetic force that predominates in our own part of the universe.

The infrared (heat) emissions detected near RXJ0806.4–4123 with the Hubble Space Telescope are puzzling, because they are much stronger than what we’d expect based on the observed optical and ultraviolet emissions from neutron stars. Posselt and colleagues offer two explanations. [...]

Both possibilities are tantalizing, but what does it have to do with life? Long ago, forward thinkers [...] suggested that life on a neutron star could be based on the strong interaction (strong nuclear force) rather than electromagnetic energy. [...] magnetic forces might reshape “normal” atoms into strange configurations exhibiting long, polymer-like chains in which the nuclei lie along a central line and the electrons occupy elongated bands. Magnetically formed polymers could then align to form larger structures.

These are quite fanciful speculations, of course, and even though they help us envision how dynamic complexity can be established, they most likely have nothing to do with life....

MORE: https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet...180970510/

Watch some show on Netflix last night. They were saying the planet hunters and all their improving sensitive detection equipment are finding tons of uninhabitable planets but Earthlike is beyond rare if not at all..

(Oct 11, 2018 08:27 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: Watch some show on Netflix last night. They were saying the planet hunters and all their improving sensitive detection equipment are finding tons of uninhabitable planets but Earthlike is beyond rare if not at all..

And yet the applicable, interested parties have been progressively venerating and kneeling to a Mediocrity Principle for so many centuries that they still can't sacrilegiously get off the momentum of its bandwagon. As if a general "given" is woven into the ordinance of their cosmos, that there must be a common or universal occurrence of worlds like Earth falling out of its processes, to prevent this planet from being unique or oddball.

That doesn't necessarily equate to being "special" in terms of the only type of rare place yielding the spectrum of life from simple to complex. But so far the non-Earthlike bodies of our own solar system haven't been a shining example of their alternative properties harboring it. And interstellar examples remain taciturn up to this point (definitely not sporting a boisterous technological presence, anyway).

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