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so in an astronomical beauty contest
they might not be as popular as black
holes but it doesn't make them any less
enigmatic and extreme I'm talking about
neutron stars little is known about
these super dense remains of ancient
stars but one recent event may shed
light on at least some of their
mysteries good old regular stars keep
their spherical shape because their
gigantic mass creates a powerful
gravitational field that pulls gas
toward the center well that's happening
their cores produce enough energy to
prevent gas from gathering too close to
the center but once a star becomes too
old and massive about four to eight
times bigger than our Sun it doesn't
have any more fuel left that's why all
the reactions in its core stop the Stars
outer layers instantly try to collapse
inward but they bounce off the core
which remains incredibly dense that's
when everything but the Stars core
explodes in a fiery supernova but that's
not the end of the star
even without the outer layers its core
keeps collapsing at one moment the
pressure inside becomes so high that
electrons and protons virtually melt
into each other resulting in a mass that
consists of 90% neutrons it means that
the thing just can't be squashed and eat
ITER
it'd be like stuffing all 2700 feet of
the Burj Kalifa into an aspirin then
energy starts to leave the fading object
finishing off the transformation into a
neutron star the amount of this energy
is so great that it can be compared with
the combined light emitted by all the
stars in the observable universe energy
is leaving the star in the form of
neutrinos particles that are created
when positively charged protons turn
into neutrons during a supernova
explosion the star emits almost 10 times
more neutrinos than the number of
protons electrons and neutrons in the
Sun
no wonder such conditions give birth to
something truly scary a neutron star
which is basically a giant nucleus the
central part of an atom is relatively
small even though scientists don't know
for sure how big neutron stars are they
suppose that these space bodies
shouldn't be bigger than 20 miles across
roughly the size of Manhattan but even
with such a modest sized for a celestial
body any neutron star will be at least
two and a half times heavier than the
Sun and mind you our Sun is nearly eight
hundred sixty-five thousand miles in
diameter which is 109 Earth's put
side-to-side think of it like this if
you scoop just a teaspoon of a neutron
stars insides this stuff would weigh no
less than a billion tons
that's very dense so dense that the next
step is a black hole itself and nearly
as dances I was in middle school now
about that event I mentioned earlier
scientists have recently observed a
collision of two neutron stars they were
able to see this phenomenon thanks to
the gravitational waves the crash
created two small neutron stars collided
with immense force and merged into one
larger star the thing collapsed almost
immediately after being born but not
before it provided astronomers with
several much-needed answers like their
consistency as you can probably
understand it's impossible to create
anything like a neutron star on our
planet
that's why astronomers could only make
guesses about these things composition
there were two main theories some
scientists claimed that neutron stars
were soft and pliable while others were
sure that they were extremely hard and
could withstand immense pressure if
neutron stars were soft it would take
them almost no time to collapse but the
picture astronomers saw in a short
period of time between the collision and
the collapse was different the new star
was spinning so fast that the speed of
its rotation was holding it together
that's why the poor thing managed to
exist for a few milliseconds before it
turned into a gaping black hole it was
all the evidence supporters of the hard
neutron star Theory needed they even not
only gave scientists a better idea of
the neutron stars makeup it also helped
them figure out its size the star had to
be about 13 miles across with a mass
about 60% bigger than that of our Sun
the thing is larger neutron stars can
survive longer before collapsing with
especially huge stars the process can
take hours or maybe even days but the
star I just told you about ceased to
exist in a fraction of a second which
made astronomers conclude that it was a
baby-sized neutron star however
unfortunate the crash was for the two
stars that collided that day it shed
some more light on the mysterious nature
of neutron stars and even though
scientists kept searching the skies for
more information about these extreme
objects today we know much more about
them than we did a few years ago which
makes me wonder if scientists could find
the answers to only one space mystery
what would you want it to be black holes
dark matter the origin of our universe
let me know down in the comments but you
know one of the coolest things about
neutron stars if there was life on one
of them it'd be two-dimensional
like a comic book their gravity is
powerful enough to literally flatten
anything on their surface and if they
had an atmosphere it wouldn't stretch up
any further than a foot or so above the
surface of the star a neutron stars
magnetic field can be hundreds of
billions of times stronger than what we
have on earth I told you these guys are
extreme neutron stars also rotate and
they do it so fast your head would spin
just as much the fastest spinning
neutron star scientists know of makes
more than 700 turns per second and here
our entire planet takes a full 24 hours
to complete just one rotation another
extreme feature of neutron stars is
their
temperature the surface can get heated
up to a toasty 107 thousand degrees
Fahrenheit um s'mores anyone for
comparison the temperature on the
surface of our Sun rarely rises above
ten thousand degrees in other words a
tiny neutron star can be ten times
hotter than our massive Sun the fact
that astronomers don't know much about
neutron stars doesn't mean these space
objects are hard to come by
throughout the history of our Milky Way
galaxy there might have existed around
100 million of them but astronomers have
problems locating neutron stars because
most of them are cold and rotate very
slowly which makes them almost
undetectable at the same time the famous
Hubble Space Telescope managed to find
several that were emitting thermal
radiation
now I've already mentioned that neutron
stars have incredibly powerful
gravitational fields this is why the
light coming from one often doesn't
manage to escape and get stuck in an
orbit around the star and in this case
you can see the entire star surface only
when you observe it from one particular
point now imagine putting a sponge in a
small puddle of water the water will
fill the hollows in the sponge and
disappear in no time neutron stars work
sort of the same way as soon as they get
hold of some stray matter they
immediately suck it up like a sponge and
this can increase the speed of their
rotation by up to 100 spins a second
when neutron stars begin to rotate even
faster than usual they take on a more
oval shape but once a star gets older
and slows down it returns to its
original spherical form neutron stars
aren't always lonely Wanderers
astronomers know of at least two that
have planets orbiting around them the
origin of these satellites isn't clear
they might have been with the stars from
the very beginning and survived their
transformation into neutron stars or
they could have been captured by the
enormous gravitational pull of these
super dense space objects draw
a planet orbiting one of the neutron
stars is the tiniest exoplanet
astronomers have located so far its mass
is only two times bigger than our own
moon hey if you learn something new
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stay on the bright side of life