Do we really understand neutron star pairs or even neutron stars?

The observation of gravitational radiation by LIGO allowing interpretation as fusion of two neutron stars has challenged the views about neutrons stars and star formation: see the popular article in Quanta Magazine about the work of Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz and colleagues. Single neutron star collision with exceptional characteristics as such is not enough for revolution. One can however ask what it could mean if this event is not a rare statistical fluctuation but business as usual.

1. The pair has too high total mass: only 10 per cent of stars are estimated to be massive enough to make so massive neutron stars. Something in the models for star formation might be badly wrong.

2. Also the models for the formation of neutron star pairs are unable to explain why the abundance of so massive pairs would be so high as LIGO would predict. There could be something wrong also in the models for the collisions of stellar objects.

TGD provides several new physics elements to the possible model.

1. Galaxies, stars, even planets are tangles in cosmic strings carrying dark energy and (also galactic) dark matter and thickened to monopole flux tubes not possible in standard gauge theories. This leads to a general model of stars and of final states of stars as flux tube tangles as spaghettis filling the volume and thus maximally dense. One obtains nice quantitative predictions plus a generalization of the notion of blackhole like entity (BHE) so that all final states of stars are BHEs: BHEs would be characterizized by the quantized thickness of the flux tube in question.

   Also a TGD based modification of the view about nuclear fusion required by a 10 year old nuclear physics anomaly and “cold fusion” is involved solving a long list of nuclear physics related anomalies (see this).

2. Collision of stellar objects producing blackholes can occur much more often than expected. Suppose one has two long flux tube portions going very near to each other: they could be portions of the same closed flux tube or of two separate flux tubes. The situation would be this for instance in galactic nuclei of spiral galaxies (see this.

The colliding stellar objects correspond to flux tube tangles moving along them. Since the stellar objects are forced to move along these cosmic highways, their collisions as cosmic traffic accidents become much more frequent than for randomly moving objects in ordinary cosmology. The cosmic highways force them to come near to each other at crossings and gravitational attraction strengthens this tendency.

Situation would be analogous in bio-chemistry: bio-catalysis would involve flux tubes connecting reactants and the reduction of effective Planck constants would reduce flux tube length and bring the reactants together and liberating the energy to overcome the potential wall making reaction extremely slow in ordinary chemistry.

Already the high rate of collisions might allow to understand why the first collision of neutron stars observed by LIGO was that for unexpectedly high total mass.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

Articles and other material related to TGD.