Re: Neutron Star

Erik Max Francis wrote:
The symmetry argument doesn't work because once the ship is tidally locked to the neutron star at (or near) closest approach, what happened before is irrelevant. So whether or not it approaches with no rotation or fats rotation, once it gets close enough it is tidally locked, and then the argument I gave takes hold and it leaves with huge angular velocity on its way out.

But will it get tidally locked? That happens to moons because they're nonrigid, so energy gets dissipated that way, a rigid object that falls into tidelocked position should keep going on out of that position by conservation of energy.

Though... considering the ship will contain a mass of plasma presumably exceeding the mass of the hull, there will be energy dissipation, I don't know whether that will suffice to reach the residual spin conclusion.

So the pilot's head and feet will have a relative velocity of megameters per second... I think it's fair to say he won't be collecting his money :(

The integration I was referring to was taking into account that the human body is a solid object, not a gas, and so you'd actually have to compute stresses and strains on an appropriate material with properties at least remotely simulating the makeup of a human body to see what would happen. Computing the ending relative speeds of two separate objects 1 m apart doesn't really tell us the answer.

Er, we're talking about 1E13 J/kg of energy deposited in a timescale of less than a millisecond. In that regime yes the human body is a gas - plasma to be more precise - as is everything else composed of normal matter.

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