Monday, July 26, 2010

Extreme rheology

Extreme physics can intersect with polymers and rheology in odd manners. I mentioned last year some high-energy physics experiments of polymers being probed with muon entanglements. That is quite tame however, to what I ran across this weekend: the rheology of neutron stars.

Tautologically speaking, neutron stars are composed of neutrons. They are remnants of supernovae and are extremely dense, so much so that the gravity from the star itself bends the light from its surface enough that more than half of the surface can be viewed at one time. Given the immense distance to these stars it is quite surprising that much can be known of their nature, let alone the rheology of them.

This is a pretty crazy intersection of two diverse areas, isn't it?

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