New pet: PSR J0337+17

I did my PhD thesis on PSR J1023+0038, a millisecond pulsar that is at a fascinating point in its evolution. (In fact there have been developments since the thesis was submitted; more about that later.) But during a moment of procrastination, I got involved with a new and fascinating system. The name, unedifying as usual, is PSR J0337+17, and it is unique in that the pulsar has not just one white dwarf companion but two.




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Flywheel energy storage

In the quest for something better to run our cars on than gasoline, one of the proposals is flywheels. In fact, for a while there were flywheel-powered buses running in Switzerland and Belgium. On one level, it makes a lot of sense: you're storing energy as mechanical motion, and we're pretty good at transmitting mechanical motion from place to place. On another level it scares the living daylights out of me: a car in motion uses tens of kilowatts, so the car must be able to store hundreds of kilowatt-hours. If you let all those loose at once bad things will happen: 100 g of TNT going off releases about a hundred kilowatt-hours. Fortunately it's hard to get gasoline to do this, but a flywheel is just itching to dump all its energy. Batteries are a little scary too, to be honest. But anyway, that's all a digression: I want to talk about some really staggering examples of flywheel energy storage: pulsars and black holes.


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