Fermi Spirograph

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
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Topic 196956

Now here's something I fell over when searching for an online store that sells Spirographs. It's a multi-year composite of the Vela pulsar's gamma data from the same satellite that we process for. Beautiful ! :-)

Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

ML1
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Fermi Spirograph

Quote:

Now here's something I fell over when searching for an online store that sells Spirographs. It's a multi-year composite of the Vela pulsar's gamma data from the same satellite that we process for. Beautiful ! :-)

Cheers, Mike.


That looks like a very nice artifact of the space telescope's orbit.

Note the heptagon feature in the middle...

Might the hexagon feature at the pole of Saturn be an orbital effect from the tides from it's nearby moons?...

Keep searchin',
Martin

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Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
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HI Martin ! :-) Well I

HI Martin ! :-)

Well I never knew Saturn had one of those. They say it rotates with the planet ie. stationary with respect to the underlying mass. So there's a simple explanation, it's held together with a large one of these :

... otherwise the planet's axle will wobble loose. The southern pole's hex bolt head is probably countersunk. This confirms my long held belief that the Universe is really made of Meccano.

[ Of course, there could also be Lego Sectors .... maybe even Ikea Regions. ]

Cheers, Mike.

( edit ) Seriously now : not only is it hexagonal, but the sides are really straight. Why not 8 sides? Or five? It's dynamically stable - at least since the Voyagers - so that probably means it satisfies some extremum ( a maximum or a minimum ) of some quantity. There's a centrifugal aspect methinks. It would interesting to compare the composition of the material in the hexagon sides with that of the adjacent interior and exterior layers ( a 'sedimentation' process acting along radial lines from the pole ).

( edit ) Actually the field lines of a magnetic sextupole could act to organise such a pattern too.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

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