I've been sort of racking my brain on a little thought experiment lately. It came about after somebody asked me how much they'd weigh on a neutron star. The answer (for an average 200-lb person here on Earth) was in the order of 260 billion pounds.

Then I thought... "what if you could stand on a neutron star?" What conditions would have to exist? Now, put aside the insane heat, radiation and magnetic fields that would obliterate you from thousands of miles away, if the star was spinning fast enough, you could be chillin' at the equator, and you might even have your own oxygenated atmosphere to breathe if your luck holds out.

As far as I can tell, the fastest neutron star observed spins at 1,122 times every second. Not bad for an object several miles in diameter. But even with centripetal force counteracting gravity, you'd still be a billion pounds too heavy. But I didn't take into account relativity. Which is a bit beyond a film major such as myself (I got a C- in physics and was happy for it.) I figure since extreme speed and/or gravity causes time to tick slower relative to us, the star might be spinning much, much faster in its own little bubble of space time than we can observe. Unless that phenomenon is already corrected for when discovering a new neutron star.

So the question is: Taken into account relativity and centripetal force, is it physically possible for a neutron star to have a gravitational "safe zone" along its equator?

Ok, I know the answer is "NO, YOU WOULD DIE", but it's still fun to think about.

You'd have to be a complete degenerate.

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The views expressed are the febrile product of an overactive imagination of a person who in shadows sees the gyrating Elvis-like ghost of Leonid Brezhnev.

Let's imagine that your body (minus your head) was a weightless cylinder with a 15 cm radius, and the strength of Tungsten. This 1.7 meter long cylinder is placed vertically on a very firm surface. The we place your head on it, and your head weighs lets say 30 billion tons. As you might guess, the Tungsten would rapidly get spread out into a layer one atomic nucleus thick.

But you're asking wither it might not be possible for a rapidly enough spinning neutron star to have a place where centripetal acceleration, and relativistic factors might almost equal the gravitational acceleration. I think the answer to this is "not for long". You could contrive a situation in which a neutron star that is already spinning close to the stable limit merges with another neutron star in such a way as to add the maximum angular momentum. If that were to happen, then for perhaps some microseconds the situation you're asking about might exist before the energy lost through gravitational waves and other relativistic details slowed it down enough that your weight would crush you.

Let me add that if the spinning did get fast enough to come close to balancing gravity, the forces that degenerate the atoms would also be overcome, and so the equator of the neutron star would explode.

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Forming opinions as we speak

Groan! I collapsed when I read that joke.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Setting aside the problems mentioned above, if you could stand on the surface, what would you see looking out at the horizon.? Specifically, what would the surface look like, and how would the stars near the horizon be distorted?

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Never attribute malice to what can adequately be explained by stupidity.
Robert J. Hanlon

If that was a deliberate pun, you have a crushing sense of humor.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

I feel neutral about it.

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I'd imagine it'd be an almost perfect mirror surface, and the sky would be flickering streaks of light. Might be pretty trippy actually.

As for the neutron star puns, they give me a pulsing headache.

When you stand on a neutron star,
You won't know how flat you are.

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

Standing up on a neutron star is one of the key elements in Robert Forward's excellent science fiction novel Dragon's Egg, first published in 1981. The story centers on life forms on the surface of a neutron star, and how they deal both with the extreme gravity, and the extreme magnetic fields. Forward was a physicist, and did an excellent job describing an environment consistent with the physics of neutron stars. One of the key elements was the "hard direction" vs the "easy direction", when the neutron star creatures tried to move across (hard) or along (easy) magnetic field lines.

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Don't try this at home - We're what you call "professionals" - MythBusters.

No, I just realize the gravity of the situation.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Read last few pages of Alastair Reynolds' "Revelation Space", where a character is standing on the surface of a neutron star. She is kept alive and unharmed by local manipulation of gravity, not by spin, but since Reynolds is an astrophysicist I trust the "landscape" description to be accurate.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

ok, with or without all the luck you could happen to obtain with this neutron star situation, your skeleton couldn't hold up to that kind of pressure.

i think anybody who has watched dragonball Z, when goku was flying to namek in bulma's dad's space ship and turned on the gravity to train while he waited to get there would know this (turned it to like 1000x I think and made a comment about his skeletal structure crushing if it was any higher)

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SAO <3's S.C.W.

i was practically laying flattened to the floor laughing when i read these

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SAO <3's S.C.W.

humor is a bit thin on the ground around here.

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plenty of woo, at the hotel hoagaland...

As is pretty much anything else on the surface of a neutron star!

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

I'm sorry for starting this punning, I was just being dense. I'd be crushed if you didn't care for it.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Well all the atoms in your body would be deformed into elongated spikes, making it a thorny situation at best.

Also with an atmosphere of vaporized iron 1 cm thick, it leaves very little breathing room.

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The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.

I hope my puns don't fall flat.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

While they are an attractive place to visit, I've heard that the services and amenities are spread thin on the ground.

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The views expressed are the febrile product of an overactive imagination of a person who in shadows sees the gyrating Elvis-like ghost of Leonid Brezhnev.