PlanetaryWanderer

I also feel like The Shoelace President is Obama but I'm curious what Tumblr at large thinks

a magnetar is a type of neutron star that we still know very little about, except that they exist. Neutron stars are the collapsed cores of stars that are about ~8x the mass of our sun or more after they've gone supernova - they're so tightly condensed that if they collapsed any more they'd be a black hole. They can range in size from 10-20km (6-13mi) miles across, but despite being so small they still retain nearly 1.5x the mass of the Sun, so one teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh like. One million tons on earth. Like, 900x the weight of the great pyramid of Giza or smth similarly nuts.

The gravity of these things alone is insane, but magnetars have another layer of weirdness to them that you can probably guess from the name - their magnetic fields are INSANELY powerful. Like. Remember, these things are roughly the size of Brooklyn, NY, but if you stuck a magnetar halfway between the earth and the moon - and you'd have to line the earth up about 30 times over to reach the moon btw, she's far away - the magnetic field would wipe every credit card on earth. If you were plopped down within as many as 600 miles (~966km) of a magnetar, the magnetic forces would be enough to immediately disintegrate every single atom in your body. (For context, that's about the length of the coastline of Great Britain from the northernmost tip of Scotland to the southernmost tip of England.) They also spin so fast they complete one full rotation about every two to ten seconds, which, believe it or not, is SLOW for a neutron star.

We know they exist because we've found about 30 of them total now, but we don't know much about how/why they form or how long they stay magnetars for because, well...we've only found about 30 of them so far. (By comparison we've found about a couple thousand other neutron stars.)

In my AP Art class, there was a girl who was just starting to experiment with mixed media. At this point she was still playing around, trying to decide what direction she wanted to go with her portfolio. So one critique day, she brought in an abstract canvas with some rhinestone highlights and painted and real peacock feathers. She loved sparkles and peacock feathers so she thought she’d try introducing them a *little*. And after everyone had given some input, the teacher gave her his advice, VERY roughly paraphrased here:

“So here’s the thing… I do not like this style. These are just elements that do not speak to me personally, but I see that you like them, and you’re doing interesting things with them.

“My biggest critique is, I only merely *dislike* this piece. I want you to make me HATE it. Go crazy with the things that you like. Don’t hold back trying to make it palatable to people like me. Because I am NEVER going to like it. And if the audience does not like it, it should drive them crazy seeing how much YOU love it.”

Her portfolio was chock full of neon colors and glitter and rhinestones and splashes of peacock feathers and it was a delight. Our teacher despised every piece lol, but she got great marks and I think even won some awards. And more importantly, she was happy and proud of the results. Because she didn’t limit herself by trying to appeal to people who were never going to enjoy what she enjoyed.