In The Witches’ Stones Book 1 – Igniting the Blaze, a star
known as the Firedragon plays a prominent role in Coryn and Steph’s escape from
the Organization raider spaceships.
This star is actually a neutron star of the type known as a soft gamma
repeater:
“The Firedragon was the most notorious star in the
galaxy. It had been given its name for a
reason – it did, indeed, breathe fire, in the form of intense X-rays and gamma
rays. A neutron star of the type known
as a soft gamma repeater, it poured out incredible amounts of energy in short,
unpredictable bursts. In less than an hour, these flares had been known to
produce more energy than Earth’s sun produced in decades. And those were
routine bursts of the Firedragon – a super-flare was beyond imagining, capable
of sterilizing an unlucky planet at the distance of tens of light years.”
http://www.amazon.com/The-Witches-Stones-Book-ebook/dp/B008PNIRP4
In further neutron star news in the actual world, the research
group at McGill University, to which our
astrophysics consultant, PhD student Scott Olausen, belongs recently made an important discovery
in the neutron star field - an "anti-glitch" where a neutron star
slows down rather than speeds up. Prior
to this, an anti-glitch had never been reliably detected. This gives hints about the interior of
neutron stars and the makeup of matter, since a neutron star acts somewhat like
a gigantic elementary particle (this is a hugely oversimplified explanation, of
course). The paper was recently in Nature, one of the most prestigious journals
in the science world. Here are some
links to the announcement:
Scott and the McGill Pulsar Group also have many fascinating
papers in The Astrophysical Journal.
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