AskScience AMA Series: My name is Thankful Cromartie, and I led the detection of the most massive neutron star ever (to date). Ask me anything! |
- AskScience AMA Series: My name is Thankful Cromartie, and I led the detection of the most massive neutron star ever (to date). Ask me anything!
- How far back in time would a modern English speaker have to travel before not being able to understand anyone? What about other modern language speakers?
- How does fat encourage further fat storage in the body?
- Is there a general relationship between the ability of an electromagnetic wave to penetrate materials and its wavelength?
- Is very pressurized water turned into Ice ...5,6,7... cold?
- Are ant trail pheromones directional? If so, how does this work?
- How much insulin is stored in the pancreas VS. made on-demand?
- How do we know that the Ice on other planets consists of H2O?
- When did arachnids get their simple eyes?
- Is there a “cold” type of fire?
- Do animals need to learn how to move their eyes, or is this a skill that every animal is born with?
- How does orbital resonance really work? What causes them and why are some unstable?
- Reaction between table salt + plain water + superglue?
- How do crab species that change shells know if a new shell is the proper size for them or not?
- Why are some vaccines administered IM and some administered in the fat? What happens if an IM vaccine goes into the fat, or vice versa?
- Why is it unsafe to use a jumpstart battery to power something?
- In the northern hemisphere at the most northern point, during the summer it is daylight for almost 24/7. So would the stoma of a plant be open for all that time? Or would it have to close at some point?
- What causes a sore throat?
- I was reading an article (link enclosed) which discusses the problem with the Hubble constant. Why there are discrepencies in calculating the value of the Hubble constant? And what is the importance of it?
- Could I hypothetically install a video game onto my RAM and would that be the quickest way to play?
- Why are metals found in veins/lodes rather than all mixed together?
| Posted: 17 Sep 2019 04:00 AM PDT Hey AskScience! My name is Thankful Cromartie, and I'm a graduate student at the University of Virginia Department of Astronomy and a Grote Reber Doctoral Fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, VA. My research focuses on a special class of neutron stars called millisecond pulsars. Yesterday, a paper I led along with my colleagues* in the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) collaboration was published in Nature Astronomy. It details our measurement of what is very likely the most massive neutron star ever detected. The source, called J0740+6620, weighs in at 2.14 solar masses. In short, this result was obtained by observing a general relativistic effect called Shapiro delay in a pulsar-white dwarf binary system with the Green Bank telescope, and combining that data with five years of NANOGrav observations of the pulsar. No other neutron stars have measured masses that exceed 2 solar masses outside their 1-sigma confidence intervals, so we're really excited about this result! The main motivation behind these kinds of measurements is to constrain the very poorly understood neutron star equation of state. The paper can be found here, and here's a more accessible summary of it that I wrote for Nature Astronomy. You can find me on twitter @HannahThankful. I'll be answering questions between 3:00 and 5:00 pm ET (19-21 UT). Ask me anything about pulsars, using them to detect gravitational waves, the neutron star equation of state, observational radio astronomy, astrophysics grad school, or anything else you're curious about! *I want to especially highlight my close collaborators on this work: Dr. Emmanuel Fonseca at McGill University, Dr. Paul Demorest at NRAO Socorro, and Dr. Scott Ransom at NRAO Charlottesville. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 16 Sep 2019 12:05 PM PDT So, I'm from the US and I speak English natively. While English was different here 100 years ago, I could probably understand what was being said if I were transported there. Same with 200 years ago. Maybe even 300 years. But if I were transported to England 500 years ago, could I understand what was being said? 1000 years ago? At what point was English/Old English so distinct from Modern English that it would be incomprehensible to my ears? How does that number compare to that of modern Spanish, or modern French, or modern Arabic, or modern Mandarin, or modern Hindi? etc. (For this thought experiment, the time traveler can be sent anywhere on Earth. If I could understand Medieval German better than Medieval English, that counts). Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| How does fat encourage further fat storage in the body? Posted: 17 Sep 2019 06:56 AM PDT I've often heard this, but never found a detailed explanation of it. The only thing I know is that adipocytes disrupt the hormonal balance, but not much else. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 17 Sep 2019 04:06 AM PDT I'm trying to understand if there is such a relation that would explain, for example, why WiFi in 2.4GHz is said to go farther than WiFi in 5GHz. [link] [comments]  |
| Is very pressurized water turned into Ice ...5,6,7... cold? Posted: 17 Sep 2019 06:34 AM PDT Imagine you have a planet that has the same temperature everywhere as we have here on earth. For example, 15° C. The gravitational pull of planet is high enough to create a layer of Ice 7 near it's core. Would it be cold if we touched it. I understand that changes in pressure can cause changes in temperature. But is it possible to physically achieve a state of Ice 7 without change in temperature if we had ideal conditions? How? I am not very good at physics, sorry for any inaccuracies. [link] [comments]  |
| Are ant trail pheromones directional? If so, how does this work? Posted: 16 Sep 2019 03:12 PM PDT So my understanding had been that ants find their way back and forth from food using pheromones. Today, a question occurred to me: Do the ants have a way of detecting which direction is homeward and which direction the food is along that trail? If so, how exactly does this work? I can imagine a few possibilities. The first is that the pheromone starts weak and gets stronger (or starts strong and gets weaker). The second is that a series of three or more pheromones are used in a sequence: ABCABCABC and CBACBACBA are distinct; the first contains AB, BC, and CA, while the second contains none of these (and vice versa with CB, BA, AC), so by reading as few as two signals, the direction can be determined. I felt slightly clever to think of the second possibility, so if this method is used anywhere, I would be curious to hear about it. [link] [comments]  |
| How much insulin is stored in the pancreas VS. made on-demand? Posted: 17 Sep 2019 05:53 AM PDT When it's time to jump into action, does the pancreas just release stored insulin or does it kick into gear and make it as it's needed? I'd it's a mix of both, what would you say the ratio is? What percentage is made as needed VS. released from storage? If it's released from storage, how long does it take to recover the depleted supply? Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| How do we know that the Ice on other planets consists of H2O? Posted: 17 Sep 2019 02:18 AM PDT Watching another run of the mill "Colonize Mars" videos and I heard what I've heard hundreds of times before about there being ice underneath the surface. I remember hearing the same about there being ice on the Moon and even Pluto. I never thought about it before, but how are we sure the frozen liquid we've found is H2O and will be useful in colonization or terraforming? Aren't there many other kinds of frozen liquids this could be? [link] [comments]  |
| When did arachnids get their simple eyes? Posted: 17 Sep 2019 05:32 AM PDT So, as far as I know a vast majority of arthropods have compound eyes, but that's not the case for arachnids, as they not only have simple eyes, but also have different number of these eyes. Are there any known transitional forms of these animals? [link] [comments]  |
| Is there a “cold” type of fire? Posted: 16 Sep 2019 05:45 PM PDT I was just wondering if there is a certain chemical or substance that burns at room temperature, kind of like how a human hand can melt mercury, but with fire. [link] [comments]  |
| Do animals need to learn how to move their eyes, or is this a skill that every animal is born with? Posted: 17 Sep 2019 04:51 AM PDT For instance when moving your eyes around to look at or track certain objects it feels so fluent without even having to think about it. Could it be that this skill is something that every young creature needs to learn before it is able to properly use it (like walking for babies) or is it something that you just know how to do from the moment you are born, like breathing. Maybe some animals are even better at controlling their eye movement and have much more precision than others? [link] [comments]  |
| How does orbital resonance really work? What causes them and why are some unstable? Posted: 16 Sep 2019 11:58 AM PDT |
| Reaction between table salt + plain water + superglue? Posted: 16 Sep 2019 06:13 PM PDT Hello and good day. I watched a video on how to remove superglue where the demonstrator applied a drop of superglue (not sure the brand) between his thumb and index finger and let the fingers stick together. After that he poured a teaspoon of table salt onto the affected area. Then he immersed the fingers in a bowl of plain water, rubbed the fingers, and the superglue seems to be solidified and fell off from his fingers. Can someone explain the reactions between those 3? Many thanks in advance. [link] [comments]  |
| How do crab species that change shells know if a new shell is the proper size for them or not? Posted: 17 Sep 2019 01:36 AM PDT |
| Posted: 16 Sep 2019 11:29 AM PDT |
| Why is it unsafe to use a jumpstart battery to power something? Posted: 16 Sep 2019 12:33 PM PDT Recently needed a portable battery supply to power my amateur radio. I looked into jumpstart battery devices which run at 12V, have a built-in charger and are much more compact than a car battery. The user manual for such a device specifically excludes use to power something. Why? Example: https://www.jaycar.com.au/medias/sys_master/images/9298890129438/MB3757-manualMain.pdf Quote:
Not sure if this is Physics or Chemistry, tried to set flair for both, but failed. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 16 Sep 2019 05:03 PM PDT |
| Posted: 16 Sep 2019 09:00 AM PDT I currently have a really sore throat, a precursor to my daughter's cold I've apparently caught. For me it's the worst stage of a cold and it got me wondering what it is that makes it so uncomfortable. I've tried Googling but the only answers are unhelpful articles stating "a sore throat is caused by a cold virus" etc. But how? What is it about a virus (or bacterial infection) that causes your throat to hurt so much? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 16 Sep 2019 10:14 AM PDT It's a Quanta magazine article: And why it is so important to find out how fast exactly the Universe is expanding? [link] [comments]  |
| Could I hypothetically install a video game onto my RAM and would that be the quickest way to play? Posted: 16 Sep 2019 06:52 PM PDT I'm looking at making a new PC and I'm sitting on getting 32gb RAM, and I just thought about it - is it essentially an SSD, is it quicker than that, would it even work? I don't really get how RAM works, how I understand it, it's empty on start-up and pre-loads information that is most likely to be needed next in the process? [link] [comments]  |
| Why are metals found in veins/lodes rather than all mixed together? Posted: 16 Sep 2019 05:16 AM PDT Liquid magma erupts from the mantle to become crust. Why isn't the crust well-mixed? Why are veins of precious metals, rare earths, actinides, etc, found in specific locations? If these veins are actually remnants of meteorites, which are remnants of supernovae, same question. Why would they clump together by element (or by series) out of energetically churned plasma? [link] [comments]  |
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