LMR-012 · Stars
Neutron Star
A teaspoon of one weighs as much as Mount Everest.
§ A first look
§ Depths
Six ways into the same idea — from bedtime story to chalkboard. No order required.
L1 · Crayon
Told like a bedtime story.
For a curious 10-year-old. No jargon. Just a picture in your head.
When a really big star runs out of fuel, its outside explodes (loud, dramatic, takes weeks to settle) and its middle gets crushed so hard that all the empty space inside the atoms gets squeezed out — atoms are mostly empty, remember, so there's a lot to squeeze. What's left is a tiny city-sized ball that weighs more than our entire Sun. It is the most squashed thing in the universe, short of a black hole. A spoonful of it would weigh about as much as a mountain. Some of these things spin hundreds of times every second. Some have magnetic fields strong enough to scramble a credit card from a thousand kilometres away. They are the punks of the night sky.
§ Strange but true
- 01A sugar-cube of neutron star matter weighs a billion tons — the mass of every human stacked into a teaspoon.
- 02They spin up to 700 times a second, stay perfectly aligned, and beam radio across galaxies. Nature's lighthouses.
- 03Their surface gravity is so strong, dropping a marshmallow releases the energy of a hydrogen bomb.
§ From the field journal
Neutron Star
"A teaspoon of one weighs as much as Mount Everest."
— observed, sketched, not yet fully understood.
§ Nearby
Constellations near Neutron Star
→
Star
The Sun is detonating 600 million tons of hydrogen every second.
→
Supernova
One dying star outshining its entire galaxy of 100 billion siblings.
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Black Hole
A place in the sky where the door only opens one way.
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Pulsar
A neutron star lighthouse, blinking hundreds of times a second.
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Gravitational Waves
Ripples in spacetime, detected for the first time in 2015.
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Fusion
How to make sunlight: squeeze hydrogen until it gives up.