Thousand+ Words for Nov. 28, 2025

The Most Perfect Sphere in the Universe is a Nonrotating Neutron Star--or At Least....

The most perfect sphere in the universe is a nonrotating neutron star—or at least it would be, if there were any such thing.

Of course, there’s not. All of them are rotating, and so there’s some small deviation from perfect sphericity as a result of centrifugal forces. If the neutron star rotates fast enough, the centripetal forces at the equator begins to compete with the gravity. The effect is small at first, but let the neutron star rotate fast enough, and the effect starts to add up.

There is a neutron star, G6757AH, located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, which is rotating at 76,205 times per second. It is thirteen miles across. This is about as fast as any thirteen-mile-wide object can rotate. Anything other than a neutron star would have torn itself apart long before it could be spun up that fast—but the neutron star, being in essence a single neutron, holds together under this enormous rotation, and the centrifugal forces balance against the gravity to create a zone on the surface of this object, a strip parallel to and centered on the equator that is at only 4 gee gravity. The strip is about 60 centimeters wide, 30 centimeters north of the equator and 30 centimeters south.

The Krindi evolved to take advantage of this zone, and they inhabit it.

The Krindi are a microscopic, sentient life form—sort of a smart bacteria. We had spent many years looking for extraterrestrial life in the radio bands, thinking that this would be the quickest way to communicate across the gulf between the stars. That’s because we didn’t know much about how gravity propagates until about 2100.

When the Sallendar experiments were conducted in 2090, we began to realize the that gravity propagates along force lines previously unrealized, and that it would be possible to communicate along those lines if mass could be quickly created and modulated as it was created. This became technically possible on a practical scale in 2098, and the initial transmitter/receiver pair, involving a transmitter at the old converted LHC facility in Switzerland and a receiver on the Farlight Station on the Moon.

It didn’t work very well at first, but the system was tweaked and refined, and as soon as it became sensitive enough to tell the difference between the gravity roar of black holes and the silence between them, we were able to hear the Krindi beacons almost immediately. The Krindi have set up beacons at regular intervals on their spinning star that modulate gravity waves for the purpose of attracting the attention of civilizations which learn the presence of gravity waves in the first place and develop the ability to detect them at their speed of transmission on the other.

Every schoolboy knows how Donalisa Pelletier decoded the Krindi beacon and discovered that it was a series of pulsed tones at a frequency of 445 tones per second with timed breaks that coded the composite numbers between 1175 and 2138 times the eighteenth Messier prime. We always thought an extraterrestrial intelligence would use the simple prime series in some simple base at one of the resonant frequencies of water, but of course, the Krindi don’t know anything about water. To the Krindi, it is obvious that the breaks between the tones, as opposed to the tones themselves, is the location of the variation in modulation that constitutes their code. There’s some technical reason why the 1175 to 2138 stretch of numbers is important to the Krindi, one that they would think would both be picked up by somebody like us and understood to be of intelligent design, something having to do with their metabolism; it's difficult to be certain, because no Krindi have ever been studied directly. They don't survive travel away from their star, and although we have landed ships on their star, it has not been practical so far to study the Krindi directly or really do very much at all except communicate with them.

The proper adjective Krindi derives from the Krindi name for their home—Krin. We were able to get a lot of technical information from them about gravity generally and about the space-time warping process. Turns out that gravity has very little to do with mass after all, but that mass and gravity are both produced by a particular particle-particle tension. We used that information to build ships that could warp space to get from Point A, say the Farlight Station to Point B, the Krindi Strip, without occupying all the 28,000 light years in between.

That’s how we manage to get to Krin. Otherwise, there’d be no way to make the trip at all. And even if we did, we don’t have any substance to build a ship out of that can withstand the tides, and no way to accelerate into a fast enough orbit to match the star’s speed of rotation and land on it. But there are ways to do it, and it has been done, with the slide engines.

The Krin are microscopic creatures who do not have any direct knowledge of the universe beyond the strip of their star where they live. To the Krin, the sky consists of static stripes of light. These static strips are actually stars that if not for the violent rotation of Krin, would look much like stars look from Earth—but of course, Krin is rotating so fast that everything in the Krin sky is smeared into a permanent stripe.

Krin is surprisingly cold for a neutron star, and of course it doesn’t have any day or night or seasons or years because there's no central star shining on it; it simply rotates as a solid body, so fast that it becomes difficult to conceptualize. A point on the equator is moving, relative to the rest of universe, at nearly one percent of the speed of light. But they do have a civilization, a culture, and they can communicate with us, and we can answer back. We've learned enough to do that. And we've learned that they're way ahead of us in a couple of critical areas.

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