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Three Mysterious Pulsar Glitches Reveal What’s Happening Inside a Neutron Star

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Astronomers have discovered three sudden rotation changes, or glitches, in the young neutron star PSR J1637−4642.

After more than a decade of apparent stability, observations from the Murriyang radio telescope revealed these unexpected speed-ups, offering new clues about superfluid matter hidden inside neutron stars. The star’s gradual recovery could help scientists understand how matter behaves under the most extreme conditions in the universe.

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Three Mysterious Pulsar Glitches Reveal What’s Happening Inside a Neutron Star

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Bedtime Astronomy — Three Mysterious Pulsar Glitches Reveal What’s Happening Inside a Neutron Star. Machine-transcribed; use the interactive transcript above to jump the player to any line.

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Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos with our soothing Bedtime Astronomy podcast. Each episode offers a gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond. Perfect for unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful slumber under the night sky. I want you to imagine the most precise, perfect clock in the entire universe. We are not talking about a standard grandfather clock here. Right. No, not a grandfather clock. We aren't even talking about those hyper-advanced atomic clocks either. The ones that physicists keep locked away in sterile temperature-controlled vats of liquid nitrogen. Yeah, exactly those. Picture something way bigger. Picture a cosmic lighthouse. Oh, I like that analogy. It's floating out there in the absolute freezing dark of deep space and it's spinning. Spinning endlessly.

Endlessly. With a rhythm that is so mathematically flawless, so completely perfect that you can literally set your watch to it from thousands of light years away. Which is fascinating because it represents a level of mechanical perfection that almost feels unnatural. It does feel unnatural. Yeah, I mean, when we look at the cosmos, we usually observe chaos. Right. Galaxy is colliding. The star is detonating massive clouds of turbulent gas just swirling around. It does violent, messy stuff. Completely messy. But these specific objects, they offer this profound rhythmic certainty amidst all that chaos. Like metronomes. Yes. They are the literal metronomes of the universe. A comforting rhythmic certainty just tick, tick, tick, tick. But now I want you to imagine you've been watching that perfect cosmic metronome for a decade. A long time in human terms. Yeah, ten whole years. And every single tick arrives exactly when you expect it down to the fraction of a millisecond.

Complete predictability. And then, at a nowhere, suddenly, violently. It hiccups. It hiccups. The clock just skips forward. Yeah. And it's just a fraction of a hair, right? But it completely shatters that illusion of perfect, predictable silence. Because in astrophysics, silence is rarely just empty space. Right. It is almost always a mask. A mask for what? It's a cover for hidden tension. When you have a perfectly rhythmic celestial body that suddenly disobeyes its own internal clock, you aren't looking at a simple mechanical error. You're not just seeing a glitch in the data. No. Absolutely not. You are witnessing a catastrophic release of invisible stress. Which is wild to think about. And that is exactly what we are going to explore today. We are going to journey beneath the solid rigid crust of a dead star to figure out why that happened. It's an incredible process. It really is. Yeah. Specifically, we are tracking the mystery of a young pulsar. It's known as PSR J1637 minus 4642.

Quite a catchy name. Oh, yeah. Astronomers are great at naming things. But we are going to uncover the extreme, almost unbelievable physics that causes perfectly rhythmic celestial bodies to suddenly glitch. It requires a deep dive into the anatomy of a dead star. Exactly. So strap in because we are diving beneath the crust. And we don't really need to retread the basics of how massive stars collapse into dense spheres. No. I think anyone who follows astronomy knows the violent origin story of a neutron star. A massive star runs at a fuel, gravity, crushes it inward, boom. Supernova. Exactly. But the sheer extremity of the specific star's current state is really where we need to start. Yeah, let's lay down the foundation. Yeah. Because to understand the mechanism of a glitch, we have to establish the physical parameters of PSR J677 minus 4642. And the vital statistics here are just staggering. They really are. So first off, this pulsar is roughly 41,000 years old. Which, you know, to human ears sounds ancient.

Right. 41,000 years ago is what the upper paleolithic period, humans were painting in caves. Exactly. But astronomically speaking, it's nothing. Right. So, in the end, I mean, our sun is roughly 4.5 billion years old. Billion with a B. Right. So, 41,000 year old star is practically still in the cosmic delivery room. It's a newborn. It is. It's newly formed. It is intensely hot. And because it is so young, it is spinning at a remarkable velocity. Okay. Let's talk about that velocity because it completes one full rotation every 154 milliseconds. Yes. 154 milliseconds. Okay. Let's make that number visceral for anyone listening. We know that the average human blink takes about a third of a second. Right. Roughly 300 to 400 milliseconds, depending on the person. Okay. So, let's use 300 milliseconds. That means this massive star, which is packing the mass of something larger than our sun, into a sphere the size of a small city, right? Yes. Roughly 12 miles across. 12 miles. Okay. This city size sun is completing roughly six full rotations in the time it takes you to

blink once. It's almost impossible to picture. It's like a cosmic blender on the highest possible speed setting. That's a really good way to put it because the physical forces that play there are difficult to comprehend. I mean, how does it even stay together? Well, that's the thing. You have this massive sphere spinning multiple times a second. The centrifugal force trying to tear that star apart, trying to fling its material out into the void, is astronomical. Because the equator is moving so fast. Exactly. The equator of this pulsar is moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Wow. So it really should just fly apart. Like, if you spin a merry go round too fast, eventually everybody flies off. It absolutely would fly apart if not for the gravitational pull inward, which is equally unfoundable. Because it's so dense. Right. These two forces are locked in a state of absolute sheer extreme equilibrium. That's a tug of war. A very violent tug of war. The inward crush of gravity perfectly balances the outward centrifugal tear. But I have to imagine a young star in that state of hyper-violent equilibrium is going

to be messy. Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's still cooling down from its birth. It's radiating massive amounts of energy. The expectation has to be that this thing is going to wobble or stutter or show some kind of complex timing behavior. And that is exactly the standard theoretical model for young pulsars. We expect them to be messy. They are typically expected to exhibit erratic timing behaviors. Their interiors are theoretically very turbulent. Because they're still settling. Yes. As they cool, their internal structures settle, and that settling process should be noisy, so we expect to see irregularities. Which brings us to the decade of silence. The anomaly. Yeah. So astronomers use the Marie-Ang radio telescope. That's the massive dish at the Parks Observatory in Australia, right? That's the one. So they use Marie-Ang to collect data continuously on this star. They monitored it from February 2009 all the way to October 2024. Which is an enormous 15.5 year observation period. That is a massive chunk of timing astronomy.

And for roughly the first 10 years of that, this infantile, supposedly turbulent star remained entirely, completely quiet. And a single hiccup. No stutters, no glitches, just a perfectly steady, 154 millisecond pulse. A decade of immaculate timing. Which is weird, right? I want to challenge the astronomical process here for a second, because getting telescope time is notoriously difficult. Oh, it's highly competitive. And incredibly expensive. So why keep staring at a star that isn't doing anything? It seems counterintuitive. Yeah. If it's perfectly predictable for 10 whole years, and you have limited funding, and there are literally thousands of other cosmic anomalies to study, wouldn't a research team eventually just point that dish somewhere else? Well, what's fascinating here is that the justification for continuing the observation lies entirely in the theoretical paradox it presented. OK, what do you mean? The silence itself was the anomaly. It's a matter of negative space. Like the fact that nothing was happening was the event. Precisely.

We knew the physical parameters. We knew its age, its mass, its spin rate, and every single model suggested that a star in this state had to be volatile. But it wasn't. Exactly. The fact that it was acting perfectly stable meant one or two things. Why there are fundamental models of young pulsars were deeply fundamentally flawed, which would be a huge deal. Huge? Or the pulsar was hiding its volatility below the surface. So the silence wasn't boring. The silence was suspicious. Highly suspicious. The astronomical community realized that the longer the star remained quiet, the higher the probability that something immense was brewing out of sight. It was holding its breath. Yes. And the value of long-term scientific patients paid off spectacularly here. Because they stayed on it. Because they started on it. If they had abandoned the observation after eight years, this pulsar would simply be a footnote about inexplicable stability. But because they kept monitoring that specific patch of sky, they captured the exact moment the silence finally broke.

OK, let's talk about that break. The glitch. We've established that a glitch is a sudden increase in the star's rotation rate, right? Correct. A celestial object floating in a vacuum just suddenly speeds up. I think a lot of people might assume this is caused by an external factor. Like an impact? Yeah. Maybe it swallowed an asteroid or it got bumped by a stray gravitational wave or something. It's a logical assumption. Right. But the prevailing theory points inward, not outward. We have to dive beneath the solid crust of the star to find the culprit. OK, let's go under the crust. So let's completely discard the idea of a star as a uniform ball of hot gas. OK, throw that out. Because a neutron star is essentially a giant atomic nucleus and it has distinct layers. Like an onion. Sure, an incredibly dense onion. The outermost layer is a highly rigid solid crust. It's composed of tightly packed atomic nuclei forming a crystal lattice. And it was solid. We don't mean like earth rocks. We're talking about a lattice, millions of times stronger than terrestrial steel.

Easily. It is incomprehensibly rigid. But as you travel deeper beneath that crust, the pressure becomes so overwhelming that those atomic structures actually break down. The atoms just get crushed. Exactly. We move past the solid lattice and into a realm governed entirely by quantum mechanics. It gets weird. Very weird. The intense pressure forces protons and electrons to merge together, leaving an environment composed almost entirely of neutrons. Pinch the name, neutron star. Right. And under these specific ultra dense quantum conditions, these neutrons pair up and form a superfluid. OK, a superfluid. I've seen laboratory demonstrations of superfluid healing on earth. Yes, it's a bizarre stuff. It climbs up the walls of glass beakers. It leaks through microscopic pores because it has like absolutely zero viscosity. Zero internal friction. Right. It is a frictionless liquid. But scaling that up to the interior of a star, are we essentially dealing with a rigid ultra dense shell filled with a heavy frictionless liquid core?

The water balloon analogy is a great starting point for this. OK, so a cosmic water balloon. Provided we remember that the fluid inside doesn't behave like water at all. Right. Because no friction. Exactly. If you stir a cup of water, friction eventually brings the water to a halt. It's closed down and stops. But a superfluid, once you set it in motion, will spin forever. Forever. Wow. In a neutron star, you have this incredibly rigid outer crust spinning. And this frictionless ocean spinning right alongside it. But they aren't perfectly synced up, are they? No, they're not. Because as the pulsar shoots out those massive beams of radio energy, it is losing rotational energy over time. Exactly. It's radiating energy away. So the solid crust is technically hitting the brakes. It's decelerating very, very slowly over thousands of years. The crust slows, yes. The frictionless superfluid inside doesn't feel that deceleration. Because it doesn't rub against the crust. Exactly. It has no viscosity. So it retains its original faster rotation.

It wants to keep spinning at the higher velocity it was born with. So the outside is slowing down, and the inside is basically trying to floor the gas pedal. That's the dynamic. But wait, I would assume they would just slide past each other infinitely, since the fluid has zero friction. Why does the crust eventually catch up to the fluid speed in a glitch? This is where it gets really interesting. Hey, it's Tories Belling with Back to School season here. The focus at my house has shifted to classes, assignments, and after school activities. And good nutrition is especially important. Lean Weep is packed with protein, iron, zinc, and other essential nutrients that help kids thrive in the classroom and stay energized throughout the day. Visit back to schoolcalifornia.com for money saving offers on beef. Delicious recipes and more. Talk to school nutrition starts with back to schoolcalifornia.com.

Sign up for pre-sale access now at livenation.com. Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albert Sins, Vaughn's, and Pavilion. Fall is coming, which means cough and cold season is almost here. Get ahead by stocking up on all your favorite cough and cold essentials now through September 29th. Shop in store and online to save on products like Allegra tablets, Hallstrops, Musinx Kickstar, Zyrtec Allergy Relief tablets, Tylenol Liquid Gels, One a Day Men's Health, and Vicks Daquel and Nikel Combo Pax. Offer and September 29th, Restrictions Apply offers may vary. Visit Albert Sins, Vaughn's or Pavilions.com for more details. It's because of the bizarre nature of quantum rotation. Okay. A superfluid cannot rotate like a normal liquid. It can't just swirl around in a continuous flow. To rotate, a superfluid must form microscopic quantized tornadoes. Wait, microscopic tornadoes? Yes, they are known as quantum boardacies. That sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie. It does, but it's very real physics. There are millions of them, threading through the fluid,

parallel to the star's axis of rotation. Like little pillars of spinning fluid. Precisely. And here is where the friction is reintroduced. These boardacies extend outward and physically interact with the inner boundary of the solid crust. Oh, so they touch the inside of the shell. Right. Because the crust isn't perfectly smooth on the inside. It has structure. It has complex formations that astrophysicists jokingly call nuclear pasta. Nuclear pasta? I love that. So the inside is bumpy. Very bumpy. And the quantum boardacies actually pin themselves to the crystal lattice of that crust. They hook onto the inside of the shell. Exactly. They get pinned. Okay, so you have an interior ocean trying to spin faster. But it is physically tethered to a slowing outer crust by millions of microscopic quantum hooks. That's a perfect visualization. And the tension that creates is colossal. I can't even imagine. For years, or in the case of PSRJ1637-4642, for a full decade, the superfluid is tugging on these pin vortices.

Just pulling and pulling. Right. It's trying to transfer its faster momentum to the crust, but the crust holds firm. Because the lattice is so strong. Yes. So the tension just builds. It stretches these theoretical tethers to their absolute physical limit. Until the hooks break. Until a critical threshold of stress is reached, yes. Suddenly, millions of these quantum vortices unpin simultaneously. In a fraction of a second, there is a massive, violent transfer of angular momentum from the frictionalist superfluid to the solid outer crust. It just dumps all that energy. Exactly. The interior fluid effectively kicks the heavy outer shell forward, forcing the star to abruptly jerk and spin faster. And that suitor violent acceleration is the glitch. That is the glitch. And for this star, it took a full decade for that tension to snap. Ten years of silent stress. The findings analyzed by astronomers, Zowie Wang, and the team at Shiyem and University, mapped out this exact breaking point. Yes, they did phenomenal work.

They combed through the Marie-Yang telescope data and revealed that our quiet, stable star didn't just glitch once. No, the dam broke. The dam broke. And it resulted in a trifecta of hiccups over the next several years. Three distinct glitch events. And this raises an important question, because each one offers a totally different window into the internal stress dynamics. So let's break them down. The first glitch, the one that finally shattered the silence around 2018. That was the big one. By far the strongest. The data showed the star's rotation frequency suddenly spiked by roughly 17.54 microhertz. Okay, let's contextualize that number. Because an increase of 17.54 microhertz corresponds to a fractional change of about 2.7 parts per million. Correct. Now, to the average person listening right now, 2.7 parts per million sound practically non-existent. It sounds infinitesimally small. Right. If the stock market shifted by 2.7 parts per million, nobody would even blink. So why is this considered a massive, violent event?

Well, the scale is deceptive because we are so used to earthly physics. Okay, explain that. If you were driving a car and you increase your speed by 2.7 parts per million, you wouldn't feel a thing. This pedometer wouldn't even twitch. Right. But we aren't talking about a car. We are talking about accelerating a mask greater than our entire sun, which is already spinning six times a second. The inertia must be incomprehensible. It is. The amount of kinetic energy required to instantly accelerate a cellar mass object by even a fraction of a microhertz is, frankly, apocalyptic. Apocalyptic energy, wow. The energy released in that single moment of unpainting and momentum transfer dwarfs the entire energy output of our sun over thousands of years. In a fraction of a second. Yes. It breaks a tectonic snap on a stellar scale. In the context of angular momentum, a 2.7 parts per million leap is a catastrophic quake. Okay, so glitch one is a massive stellar quake. It dumps all this energy, the crust speeds up.

Does the star then reset and go back to sleep for another 10 years? You would think so, but the data tells a much more chaotic story. It didn't go back to sleep. Not at all. About three years after that initial massive glitch, the team detected a second event. Okay, so a three-year gap this time. Yes. But the magnitude was wildly different. Oh, different. The frequency changed by only 14 nanoharts. Nanoharts. We went from microhertz to nanoharts. Exactly. That is an energy release what thousands of times smaller than the first one? It is a fraction of a fraction. A microquake followed by a nanohquake. Okay, but it didn't end there either, right? No. Roughly 2.7 years after the second glitch, a third event occurred. And how big with this one? This one sat in the middle. It was an intermediate strength glitch, producing an increase of about 179 nanoharts. Okay, so let's look at this pattern. A massive quake, than a three-year gap, than a tiny tremor, than a 2.7-year gap, and then a medium quake. Yes. The spacing there, roughly three years between the subsequent glitches,

that seems incredibly specific. The spacing is perhaps the most tantalizing piece of the puzzle here. Really? Why? It suggests a reloading mechanism. A reloading mechanism. Okay. Think about the initial 2018 glitch. That was a near total release of a decade's worth of built-up tension. Millions of vortices unpinned, transferred their momentum, and then had to find new anchor points on the crust. Like tectonic plates settling into a new locked position after an earthquake. Exactly like that. Though the time frame to build stress back up to a critical point was vastly accelerated. Right, because it didn't take 10 years the second time. It only took three. Okay, so why snap so soon? The smaller magnitudes of the second and third glitches indicate that the system hadn't reached maximum capacity before snapping again. It was sort of misfiring. You could say that. The star was in a volatile state of readjustment. It was attempting to find a new equilibrium between the crust and the superfluid, and it kept stumbling. I want to focus on that readjustment period. Because this is where the Shimon University analysis

completely blew my mind. It's brilliant work. It really is. So when this massive transfer of momentum hits the crust in 2018, the star doesn't just instantly click into a new, faster speed and stay there perfectly, does it? No, it doesn't. It enters a period of what the researchers called prolonged relaxation. Prolonged relaxation, how does that work? The analogy of dropping a spinning top on a slightly uneven surface works well here. Okay, I can picture that. When the top picks the table, it wobbles violently at first, and then it slowly settles into a smooth spin. Yeah. Inside the star, when the superfluid kicks the crust forward, it disrupts the internal temperature and the frictional coupling of the entire star. It shakes the whole system up. Exactly. The crust accelerates abruptly, but over time, part of that speed increase slowly decays. It bleeds off. Yes. The different layers of the star are essentially negotiating their new shared velocity. And according to the telescope data, that negotiation that cool down period

took roughly 102 days. 102 days of settling. For over three months, this ultra-den star was physically vibrating, slowly relaxing into its new equilibrium. And the mathematical analysis of that 102 day relaxation curve allows astronomers to achieve something profound. This is the part that is just wild. They can effectively weigh the invisible ocean inside the star. OK, let's walk through the math on that. Because on the surface, claiming you can weigh a quantum liquid hidden beneath a steel crushing crust, simply by watching how long it takes a radio pulse to stabilize. Yeah. That sounds like magic. It does sound like magic, but it relies on the concept of moment of inertia. Moment of inertia. Yes, which basically dictates how difficult it is to change the rotational speed of an object. Like trying to spin a bowling ball versus a basketball. Exactly. The relaxation phase is driven by mutual friction between the normal matter in the crust and the superfluid core. OK. By measuring the exact shape of the exponential decay in the star's rotation over those 102 days,

basically charting how the wobble moves out, physicists can isolate the specific mass of the superfluid that is recovering with the crust. So the speed at which it settles down is directly proportional to how much invisible fluid is sloshing around in time. Yes. The heavier the fluid, the different the wobble. That is so elegant. And the Shimon team's modeling concluded that about 1.9% of the neutron star's total moment of inertia is associated with the superfluid material located specifically within the inter crust. 1.9%. Yes. That is such a spectacularly precise number to pull from radio blips captured from light years away. The precision is what makes it a massive triumph of observational astrophysics. It really is. For decades, theoreticians have been working with a two component model of neutron stars on chalkboards. They've been arguing endlessly about the mass fraction of the superfluid. Just guessing based on math. Right. And the math always suggested it should be a relatively small percentage of the total moment of inertia. But by patiently observing the 102 day aftermath

of the 2018 glitch, this team provided actual observational proof that validates decades of abstract theoretical physics. They basically gave a sonogram to a dead star. That's a great way to frame it. They mapped its internal organs just by listening to its hiccups. And in doing so, they fundamentally altered our understanding of what a quiet pulsar actually is. Because it wasn't quiet. The ultimate conclusion of Zoui Wang's research is a paradigm shift. We can no longer look at a young pulsar that hasn't glitched in a decade and assume it is stable. We're inactive. Exactly. It redefines the word completely. If a star is young and it is spinning that fast, the laws of physics dictate that the internal stress is building whether we can see it or not. The stress is always building. The silence is not an absence of activity. The silence is the sound of the tension stretching to its absolute physical limit. If we connect this to the bigger picture, it mirrors earthly geological systems perfectly. Oh, like earthquakes. Consider the San Andreas fault.

Right. To a casual observer walking on the surface, the ground is completely still. It appears stable and quiet. You wouldn't know anything was happening. But a seismologist knows that the tectonic plates beneath the surface are locked. And the longer they remain perfectly quietly locked, the more immense the subterranean stress becomes. The silence is the threat. The silence guarantees that a massive earthquake is inevitable. Wow. So the decade of perfect timing for PSR J1637 minus 4642. That was just a decade of mounting invisible internal pressure. It was holding its breath. Just holding it until it couldn't anymore. The superfluid was pulling. The crust was holding on. And the long period of philolous precision was merely the prologue to the snap. And this changes everything for other stars, right? It forces astronomers to reconsider every single stable young pulsar currently in our catalogs. They aren't anomalies of peace. No, they are ticking time bombs of angular momentum.

That is just incredible. Let's pull all of this together. Because the journey from the surface to the core here is staggering. We started with the illusion of the perfect cosmic clock. The perfect metronome. Right. A 41,000-year-old dead star, spinning every 154 milliseconds, sweeping radio beams across the Murrayang telescope with flawless precision for 10 solid years. But thanks to the sheer stubborn patience of the astronomical community, we didn't look away. And because we didn't look away, we captured the exact moment the illusion broke. We dove beneath the crust stronger than steel. Right into an environment where pressure crushes atomic structure into a frictionless quantum liquid. The super fluid. We found microscopic tornadoes acting as invisible hooks, tethering a slowing shell to a speeding ocean. The quantum boardacies. And we watched a decade of silent stress. Finally, shatter those tethers in 2018, violently transferring enough kinetic energy to shift the momentum of a sun-sized object in a fraction of a second. It really is on-spiring relayed out like that.

And then we watched the star spend 102 days slowly catching its breath, giving us the mathematical key to way it's hidden interior. It is a masterclass in how observing macro events, shifts in radio pulses measured in microhertz, allows us to confirm the microphysics of quantum mechanics happening inside an extreme environment we could never possibly replicate on Earth. I mean, for everyone listening to this, I think the grand takeaway transcends astrophysics entirely. It's a powerful reminder about the nature of observation itself. Absolutely. Extended periods of quiet rarely mean that nothing is happening beneath the surface. True stability is incredibly rare, and in many systems, silence is just the accumulation of tension. It's a sobering reality to apply to the universe at large. It really is. I mean, think about it. If an ultra-dense, 41,000-year-old celestial body can silently build up invisible internal stress for a full decade, before violently shifting its entire momentum without a single warning sign. What else is out there doing the same thing?

Exactly. What other perfectly rhythmic, seemingly quiet systems out there are doing the exact same thing? Just waiting. What other massive forces, perhaps even closer to home in our own stellar neighborhood, are silently building tension right now, perfectly stable on the surface, just waiting for their inevitable moment to glitch. Now, that is a thought that will keep you up at night. Next time you look up at a perfectly still quiet night sky, just remember that chaos locked beneath the surface. Thank you for joining us on this descent into the quantum depths of a dead star, and for helping us untangle the incredibly violent physics behind the perfect ticking of the cosmos. Keep questioning the quiet ones, and we'll catch you next time. Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albert Sins, Vans, and Pavilion. Follow us coming, which means coffee and cold season is almost here.

Get ahead by stocking up on all your favorite cough and cold essentials now through September 29th. Shop in store and online to save on products like a lot of food. And we'll see you next time. Bye.

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