From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Tue Aug 05 2003 - 00:48:30 MDT
At 02:52 PM 8/4/03 -0700, Lee wrote:
>Damien writes (with satire turned-up to an unknown degree)
>> Even if they don't exist, they make very pretty pictures in
>> the sky. Get a load of the gorgeous thing in NGC4261 at...
No no, I just thought it was a pretty (and pretty awe-inspiring) picture.
>I maintain only that the event horizons of this object and
>other black holes have not *yet* formed, and there are as
>yet *no* singularities over which to worry.
You might find this of interest:
http://users.rcn.com/wcri/wcri/Vacuum%20Packing%20Text.htm
BTW, I'm currently playing with the fictional idea of a star made from Xons
or X-particles, the unification-energy entities proposed by GUTs. If anyone
here with the relevant expertise cares to play, I'd be interested to hear
some estimates of the maximum radius we'd expect of such a body before it
closed off its local spacetime by gravity. An X is thought to be 10^15 or
10^16 GeV, compared with a nucleon of some .93 GeV. My rough and ready
calculation suggests an approximately Solar-mass body of Xon matter might
fit inside a sphere 20 centimeters across. But I'm terrible at this sort of
thing. (A neutron star's about 20 km across.) I think Walker in the above
paper suggests it'd only be 10-3 centimeters.
Damien Broderick
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