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| The image attempts to capture a sense of the energy released by a "starquake" -- a millimeter's vertical displacement in the surface of a highly magnetic neutron star. Tightly constrained by the immensely strong magnetic field, a burst of very hot plasma slowly releases a stream of "soft" gamma rays. Such an event thousands of light-years away can give everyone on earth a radiation dosage equivalent to a dental xray.
The chaotic field lines were created in pencil, then scanned, reversed and colorized in Photoshop. The cracks on the surface of the star were traced from a digital photograph of a badly-eroded asphalt parking lot, then mapped onto a sphere in Cinema 4D. |
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