Invasion of the Giant X-Ray Bubbles
More bizarre news from the bizarre world of neutron stars: They got dozens of giant X-ray bubbles taller than the Empire State Building forming and popping every second. Yet finding evidence of this bubble blowing was no childish endeavor. It took a team of Berkeley scientists just about all they could muster: three days' worth of observational data and 1,200 hours of number-crunching on the slickest of supercomputers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Mind you, these are the same powerful computers used to model nuclear reactions and calculate Bill Gates' salary. Neutron stars are already known as the bad boys of the cosmic neighborhood. They are the core remains of exploded stars, with a mass greater than our sun condensed into a sphere no bigger than Manhattan, A teaspoon of its densely-packed surface matter, the analogy goes, would weigh three billion tons back on earth. Its 10 trillion gauss magnetic field could wipe your credit card clean at a distance half-way to the moon. Its intense gravity lures gas from nearby stars, spinning the neutron star to speeds of up to a thousand times a second. But giant X-ray bubbles dancing on the surface? That even freaked out the discoverers. "Early on, I tended to disbelieve what the calculations were telling me," said Richard Klein, who splits his time between Berkeley and LLNL. "The bubbles 'appeared' and I wasn't convinced they were real."