Whenever I read about neutron stars, they are always too far away (like millions of light years), so I did a quick search and found one closest to earth about 250 to 1000 light years and apparently it is above the plane of the milky way galaxy.
Let's not forget that this neutron star is measured at 5.8 kiloparsec distance from earth which is 18,917.1 light years.
Even if observable electromagnetic radiation was traveling at the speed of light, which most is not, we are looking at ancient history, because once this EM reaches earth we are studying phenomena that occurred >189 centuries ago.
We don't have a way to know if this star is even still there.
Everything studied in astronomy at significant light years distance is ancient phenomena, we are just seeing it/sensing it/evaluating it now.
We've never been up close, but the neutron star is probably smoother.
A neutron star has a diameter of about 20km and surface irregularities are currently estimated at under 1 mm. (See https://www.livescience.com/millimeter-tall-neutron-star-mou... for verfication.) Scale that up to the Earth's diameter and irregularities are on the scale of 64 cm.
WOW, that is amazing. I'm always blown away by stuff like this, where you can actually get a sense of how small we all are and how distant even the closest neighbor stars are.
I just close my eyes for a minute and think (or try to), what would it be like for those people that are finally able to reach, say, Vega (I know it's not the closest). Sure, this is not a big deal in sci-fi, but for reality, it's pretty mind blowing. This is 100% why I seriously want to live for a few hundred years: to have an opportunity to see the first time we actually go to the nearest star.
In the meantime, I guess this will have to suffice.
`This is the nearest known black hole by a factor of 3, and its discovery suggests the existence of a sizable population of dormant black holes in binaries.`
It's still 1560 light years away. It's a binary system that includes a star very similar to our Sun and a black hole, and apparently they choose to live together peacefully, not exchanging mass. Black holes are hard to detect, let alone dormant black holes like this one, even though there are hundreds of millions of them in our galaxy alone. We only managed to detect a couple dozen.
Distance is not typically the limiting factor. Earth is close enough to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way to be able to see it. The problem is it’s obscured by other stuff, mainly dust.
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https://www.space.com/4247-astronomers-find-closest-neutron-...
I wish we could watch these neutron stars and black holes more closely, we know so little about the universe.
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