Owed to Neutrons

Someone once said that ‘discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.’
It is the purpose of this book to propose some such thinking, in the hope that it can be picked up on by some giant in the field of cosmology, who might put it through various tests to disprove its ideas. Or not.

It has also been said that the fate of a new idea in science is first to dismissed as ridiculous, then to become a revolutionary new theory, and finally to be regarded as self-evident.
The ideas proposed are those of a layperson, neither schooled in physics nor writing, but whose passion for popular science books, especially those on particle physics and cosmology, has culminated in this attempt to join the debate on the origin of the universe.
The subject of the book is the neutron star, the densest form of matter known in the entire Universe, and its leading character is the yet unseen neutron, the particle with the highest threshold temperature. The threshold temperature is the temperature at which all of the rest mass of a piece of matter will transform into energy.
Discovered in 1964 by Jocelyn Bell, a neutron star is the imploded core left at the center of a supernova explosion, which supposedly signals the end of the life of stars of a certain size.
Not Jocelyn Bell, or indeed anyone else, has ever seen a neutron star. Evidence for their existence comes mainly from x-rays emitted by matter that has accreted around the magnetic poles of these stars that spin around at thousands of times a second.
For nearly thirty years now, scientists have been studying the pulsar (the name given to a rotating neutron star) discovered by Bell. They have now discovered that this pulsar is one of a rotating binary pair of neutron stars.

This leads us to the observation that although double and triple ordinary stars have been studied in detail, we never seem to read about triple neutron stars.
There seems to be no reason why such families of neutron stars might not exist.
The most obvious name for them would be ‘trinaries’.
The interesting thing about such a trio, locked in dance, is that they would almost certainly cause what is called a ‘black hole’. A black hole is considered to form when a massive star implodes and its core contains the mass of eight or nines times that of our Sun. Three neutron stars would have a mass of about nine Suns! So could trinaries also be candidates for black holes, or even worse, could stellar black holes be triplets of neutron stars? Stellar black holes are believed to be able to merge with one another, and thereby grow in density. Could this indicate that triplets of neutron stars are selectively gregarious, and will merge with other ‘trinaries’?

Out of every 100 newly born stars systems, 40 are triple and 60 are double or binaries.
Of the 40 triplets, 25 are long lived and relatively stable, while 15 of them promptly eject one of their stars to provide 15 binaries and 15 single stars.
Close encounters between stars then disrupt more of the binary pairs, increasing the proportion of single stars around in the galaxy at large.
Each binary yields two single stars and just 10 such disruptions changes the ratio to
25 : 65 : 35, making single stars more common than triplets.
This ratio makes it possible to speculate that triplets of neutron stars might be responsible for providing the helium abundance thought to have been produced in the early universe by a process known as nucleosynthesis.
These stable triplets might often possess the property that all three of the stars are the same size and of similar age. It is then probable that all three would have ended their nuclear fusion stages at a similar time. The fact that the ‘event horizon’, or area around a black hole from where no light can escape, somehow prevents the ‘contents’ of a black hole from reacting or interacting with material ‘outside’ of the black hole’s event horizon, might be the mechanism whereby, in a ‘bouncing’ Universe, the right proportion of ordinary matter to form helium abundances observed, was stored in this way until the black holes eventually ‘dissolved’ to expose their neutron star bounty.
In the likely event that protons will never decay outside the nucleus of atoms, the Universe could expand until all the matter within it will have broken up into protons, electrons and radiation. Excluding, of course, the trinary neutron stars locked up as black holes.

The iron ‘skin’ of a neutron star can, at a specific temperature, dissolve into helium nuclei. This process will be discussed later. Helium nuclei will not join up with anything, so it will remain separate from the protons and electrons that, upon further cooling, will form hydrogen atoms. These will go on to form hydrogen molecules made up of two H atoms. Once the skin of the neutron stars have fissioned into helium nuclei, the remaining neutrons forming the body of each neutron star will start to disperse as free neutrons because the mass of the remaining star will be less than the ‘Jeans mass’ required to hold a neutron star together.
At the right temperature, just a little below 1000 million degrees Kelvin, nucleosynthesis of helium takes place. This happens to be the temperature at the core of a neutron star! So within a few minutes, all the neutrons of the star’s core could change into helium nuclei. During this process, the observed abundances of deuterium (also known as heavy hydrogen) could also be produced.

The objective of the above postulation is to show that the Universe we presently occupy, might have come about in a manner other than described in the many versions of ‘Big Bang’ theories of evolution of the Universe.
We find that we have precisely the required ingredients for an early universe and we even have helium clumped into fairly dense clumps by way of the dispersed cores of the neutron trinaries. These may well be dense enough to allow star formation to take place in the manner that astrophysicists say that it does, by the coalescing of hydrogen and helium gas that then collapses under its own gravity to form a new dense core where fusion reactions can commence at the correct temperature.