[spam][ot][rambling][crazy] Build Something Out of a Neutron Star

[Karl]

>> Is there a limit to the pressure a fluid can hold?
>
>
> neutron stars are pretty high pressure :)
>
> but using neutron star juice in any practical sense is fraught with extreme
> difficulty! :P

It is very hard to use neutron star juice.  The biggest issue I
imagine is how very far away they are.  The next issues I imagine you
run into might be the extreme forces present inside and near them.

I'm not actually sure what a neutron star is.  I kind of imagine
matter breaking down into neutrons, protons, and electrons from being
squished so hard.  If a neutron is made of a proton and an electron,
then I guess it might kind of be like a big neutron mass, maybe, with
a sea of excess protons or electrons as a shell on the surface,
sloshing around outside it like a fluid made of raw electric energy.

Is a neutron star what makes a pulsar?  Is the pulsing from an ion
shell sea sloshing around?  I don't know.  Let's look up "neutron
star".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star

- neutron stars have a 1.4 solar mass and a radius of about 10 km.
they're like a small dense sun-corpse that you could stuff into a
suitcase to bring to their collapsing-ritual.
- neutron stars hold their shape from a combination of nuclear forces
specific to being a highly-compressed mass of neutrons.  when these
fail it becomes a black hole.

do not compress neutron stars into black holes.  i imagine this could
be done by e.g. directing them to collide.  people might be sad if
this were done.

- neutron stars are about 600k deg hot on the surface
- a matchbox sized amount of neutron star juice weighs about 3 billion tons
- the magnetic field is 10^8 - 10^15 times stronger than earth's
- surface gravity is 200 billion times earth's

- neutron stars rotate rapidly due to conservation of momentum during
collapse, like a figure skater pulling her arms in
- neutron stars are a superset of pulsars, which are the ones which
emit beams of radiation

- the mass rotation axis can differ from the electrical rotation axis.
this produces the sweeping effect of the beam making the traditional
pulsar.

Hmm.

Neutron stars sound like a powerful source of energy, and attempting
to consider their incredibly-massive innards "juice" in the
"extractable fluid" sense sounds like a very difficult challenge.
However, this is our last chance to rescue this matter and energy
before somebody collapses it into a black hole!