Billions & Billions

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Pulsars are neutron stars are also highly magnetic. While Earth has a magnetic field that's just strong enough to exert a gentle tug on a compass needle, pulsars have magnetic fields that range from 100 million times to 1 quadrillion (a million billion) times stronger than Earth's.

"For a neutron star to emit as a pulsar, it has to have the right combination of magnetic field strength and spin frequency," Quinzel told Space.com in an email. Some neutron stars may have once radiated as pulsars, but no longer radiate Quinzel also noted that the beam of radio waves emitted by a pulsar may not pass through the field of view of an Earth-based telescope, preventing astronomers from seeing it.

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A magnetar is a type of neutron star believed to have an extremely powerful magnetic field (∼109 to 1011 T, ∼1013 to 1015 G).
The magnetic field decay powers the emission of high-energy electromagnetic radiation, particularly X-rays and gamma rays.
The theory regarding these objects was proposed by Robert Duncan and Christopher Thompson in 1992, but the first recorded burst of gamma rays thought to have been from a magnetar had been detected on March 5, 1979.
During the following decade, the magnetar hypothesis became widely accepted as a likely explanation for soft gamma repeaters (SGRs) and anomalous X-ray pulsars (AXPs). On 1 June 2020, astronomers reported narrowing down the source of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), which may now plausibly include "compact-object mergers and magnetars arising from normal core collapse supernovae".

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A binary star is a star system consisting of two stars orbiting around their common barycenter. Systems of two or more stars are called multiple star systems. These systems, especially when more distant, often appear to the unaided eye 👁 as a single point of light, and are then revealed as multiple by other means.

The term double star is often used synonymously with binary star; however, double star can also mean optical double star . Optical doubles are so called because the two stars appear close together in the sky as seen from the Earth; they are almost on the same line of sight. Nevertheless, their "doubleness" depends only on this optical effect; the stars themselves are distant from one another and share no physical connection. A double star can be revealed as optical by means of differences in their parallax measurements, proper motions, or radial velocities. Most known double stars have not been studied adequately to determine whether they are optical doubles or doubles physically bound through gravitation into a multiple star system.

Binary stars .

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PULSAR
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You activate his vital systems! Insert mission disks into his “brain!” He almost “comes alive!”

At least, that is what Mattel wanted kids to think in 1976 when they released Pulsar, The Ultimate Man of Adventure.

Standing a little taller than Kenner’s Bionic Bigfoot at 13 1/2 inches, Pulsar is decked out in very 70’s stretch pants and a velcro shirt. Peel away Pulsar’s apparel and you’ll discover that our hero has a transparent chest, revealing his most intimate internal organs. Inside you’ll find a pretty reasonable facsimile of a human heart, lungs, and a circulatory system the size of the large intestines. 

In Pulsar’s back is a pump. Press on the pump and his heart beats, his lungs “breath” and the blood in his veins will flow.

Unfortunately, whatever substance was used for the blood almost always is congealed and won’t move a corpuscle. Of course, that doesn’t stop it from still being pretty cool

Pulsar’s unusual anatomy doesn’t stop there, though. Pop open his head and you’ll discover one of two of Pulsar’s holographic mission discs. Most loose Pulsar toys are missing one or both of the mission discs. While they are fun to have with the toy, they don’t actually do anything and you can’t see them unless you open up his head.

There are actually two versions of Pulsar, but the difference is very small. Pulsar’s chest is a single clear plastic piece that is screwed to the piece that makes his back. On the first, the entire front piece is clear, from his neck down to his groin, revealing the rubber used to hold his legs in place. The second variation has been painted on the inside to match Pulsar’s flesh tone so that the clear section of Pulsar’s chest stops at about his waist. Also, the second variation has a slightly more expressive and, well, friendlier, face. Although the variance is slight, the Pulsar with the painted in waist is actually a much more interesting toy to display.

While you get to see the inner workings of Pulsar’s organs, you don’t really see the inner workings of Pulsar the toy. The bottom line is that the painted in waist tells of a higher quality product.

Aside from that, Pulsar doesn’t really do anything else. Mattel also sold a medical bay that you could strap Pulsar into. In many ways, it resembles the Bionic Transport and Repair Bay.

Every hero needs an arch enemy, so Mattel also released Hypnos, the Yang to Pulsar’s Ying.

Appropriately enough, Hypnos doesn’t have a circular system, he has a hypnotic spinning disk in his chest… pretty clever eh? When you push a lever in his side, a multi-colored disk in his chest spins, extruding hypnotic rays! Hypnos is a friction toy, so when you pull his lever, e-hem, sparks fly in his chest.

Hypnos’ torso and limbs are cast form the same molds as are Pulsar’s, but his interior is dramatically different, as is his purple head. Hypnos has a very sinister cast to him, not unlike Sinestro, the rogue Green Lantern, but it is hard to be too evil when you’re naked. Hypnos’ only stitch of clothes is a black mask.

If having a little mano a mano action between Pulsar and Hypnos wasn’t enough to entertain the kids, there was also the Pulsar Life Systems playset to make sure all of Pulsar’s systems were working correctly.

Pulsar![/u]

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Stars can form orbital
systems with other
astronomical objects,
as in the case of planetary
systems and star systems
with two or more stars.
When two such stars
have a relatively close
orbit, their gravitational
interaction can significantly
impact their evolution.
Stars can form part of
a much larger gravitationally
bound structure, such as
a star cluster or a galaxy.

[Cord Hurn]

The universe is about 13.8 billion years old, according to new research recently published by an international team of astrophysicists.

While this estimate of the age of the universe had been known before, in recent years, other scientific measurements had suggested instead that the universe may be hundreds of millions of years younger than this.

The scientists studied an image of the oldest light in the universe to confirm its age of 13.8 billion years.

This light, the "afterglow" of the Big Bang, is known as the cosmic microwave background and marks a time 380,000 years after the universe’s birth when protons and electrons joined to form the first atoms.

--Doyle Rice, USA Today, June 15, 2020

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is the earth flat?