Me too! I learn so much about coding from that server in high school, it was definitely a formative experience, learning to code with other teens all over the country.
These highly magnetized neutron stars—objects only ~20 km in diameter—have magnetic fields that may reach up to 1015 Gauss, a quadrillion (thousand trillion) times our Sun’s pitiful 1 Gauss. The energy density of just these magnetic fields (via E=mc2) is 10,000x the mass density of lead. Magnetars are a likely source of Fast Radio Bursts and can also emit giant gamma-ray flares—one flare, GRB 200415A, was seen to emit the same amount of energy as our Sun does over 100,000 years, but in only 0.016 s. We don’t really know how these flares form, but if they involve large mass motions, they could also produce gravitational waves, something LIGO and other gravitational wave observatories are watching for. Near a magnetar, “X-ray photons readily split in two or merge. The vacuum itself is polarized, becoming strongly birefringent, like a calcite crystal. Atoms are deformed into long cylinders thinner than the quantum-relativistic de Broglie wavelength of an electron (pdf),” resulting in a breakdown of anything resembling what we think of as chemistry. It’s believed that their magnetic fields decay relatively quickly over about 10,000 years, so magnetars are a transient state. We know of about 30 magnetars so far. Oh, and they may also have volcanoes (sort of).
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
I think they are more drawing an analogy between the atom one or more black holes with a cloud of particles around them. Black holes are quantum mechanical and so the resulting system could behave much like an atom, including having things that look like energy levels. The universe rhymes.
This is more or less why I created Huginn. Excited to see more people thinking about systems that let you set complex triggers to know when the world changes.
Huginn is a great product, though I never used, I am aware of the value it provides.
Alertfor is not similar to Huginn. my product is part of something else, I extracted and unleased as separate product. Will go in different direction.
NIAC awards are so fun. We write about them frequently in Orbital Index because they're crazy and weird and speculative. Here are some recent favorites:
"A proposal for a beam of microscopic hypervelocity (>120 km/s) particles propelled by laser ablation to push spacecraft on fast transit interstellar precursor missions" is fairly representative of these types of awards. :)
One thing that's unusual about this mission is that it required a loitering communication satellite orbiting beyond the far side of the Moon to relay communications to Earth. https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2024-03-13-Issue-260
China's progress and this accomplishment are very impressive, the more the merrier. But NASA does have two nuclear powered humvees driving on Mars at the moment.
