Swift has made another unusual discovery. The orbiting satellite detected a very strange star that "twinkled" with gamma rays, X-rays, and light — and then vanished. Back in June the satellite detected a spike of gamma-rays that lasted less than five seconds. But this high-energy flash wasn't a gamma-ray burst [...]

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Fraser. I'd think something else might be at work here. In a pretty hard vacuum, a traveling neutron star doesn't find much dust or gas, but sooner or later it'll run into either a cometary body or a small asteroid. The energy of collision that would produce a crater on an asteroid, small moon, or planet is enhanced by the neutron star's gravity well....and it gives a small burst of gamma, X-ray,UV, optical, infrared, and radio. In the same way that nuclei oscillate after absorbing neutrons to fission....the liquid drop model, the surface of the neutron star rings, and the damped oscillations produce successively less energatic spectra. Big Reynolds number. pete

see:http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu...r/liqdrop.html

see:http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/pturb.html

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A third rate theory forbids
A second rate theory explains after the fact
A first rate theory predicts...A. Lomonosov

trinitree88

Here is another thread on this that Don Alexander started with much more info on it...

SWIFT J1955 - a missing link in the neutron star zoo??

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RussT
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Everything is, as it should be, otherwise, it wouldn't be!