"Larry Niven - Crashlander (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

expert. And I still had no idea what was waiting for me when I got down there.

All the matter you're ever likely to meet will be normal matter, composed of a nucleus of
protons and neutrons surrounded by electrons in quantum energy states. In the heart of any star
there is a second kind of matter, for there the tremendous pressure is enough to smash the
electron shells. The result is degenerate matter nuclei forced together by pressure and gravity
but held apart by the mutual repulsion of the more or less continuous electron "gas" around them.
The tight circumstances may create a third type of matter.

Given: a burned-out white dwarf with a mass greater than 1.44 times the mass of the sun --
Chandrasekhar's Limit, named for an Indian-American astronomer of the 1900s. In such a mass the
electron pressure alone would not be able to hold the electrons back from the nuclei. Electrons
would be forced against protons -- to make neutrons. In one blazing explosion most of the star
would change from a compressed mass of degenerate matter to a closely packed lump of neutrons:
neutronium, theoretically the densest matter possible in this universe. Most of the remaining
normal and degenerate matter would be blown away by the liberated heat.

For two weeks the star would give off X rays as its core temperature dropped from five billion
degrees Kelvin to five hundred million. After that it would be a light-emitting body perhaps ten
to twelve miles across: the next best thing to invisible. It was not strange that BVS-1 was the
first neutron star ever found.

Neither is it strange that the Institute of Knowledge on Jinx would have spent a good deal of
time and trouble looking. Until BVS-1 was found, neutronium and neutron stars were only theories.
The examination of an actual neutron star could be of tremendous importance. Neutron stars might
give us the key to true gravity control.

Mass of BVS-1: 1.3 times the mass of Sol, approx.

Diameter of BVS-1 (estimated): eleven miles of neutronium, covered by half a mile of degenerate
matter, covered by maybe twelve feet of ordinary matter.

Nothing else was known of the tiny hidden star until the Laskins went in to look. Now the
Institute knew one thing more: the star's spin.

***

"A mass that large can distort space by its rotation," said the puppeteer. "The Laskins'
projected hyperbola was twisted across itself in such a way that we can deduce the star's period
of rotation to be two minutes twenty-seven seconds.

The bar was somewhere in the General Products building. I don't know just where, and with the
transfer booth's it doesn't matter. I kept staring at the puppeteer bartender. Naturally only a
puppeteer would be served by a puppeteer bartender, since any biped life-form would resent knowing
that his drink had been made with somebody's mouth. I had already decided to get dinner somewhere
else.

"I see your problem," I said. "Your sales will suffer if it gets out that something can reach
through one of your hulls and smash a crew to bloody smears. But where do I come in?"