Neutron Stars

Neutron stars are born in supernova explosions. They are stars with a couple of times our sun’s mass, squeezed into a sphere the size of an earthly city.

When these stars exhaust their fuel, they undergo gravitational collapse, crushing their cores into neutron stars—objects with the mass of a star packed into a city-sized sphere. These dense remnants can spin rapidly, emit powerful radiation, and possess magnetic fields trillions of times stronger than Earth's.

Nearly all elements found in the periodic table were formed through nuclear fusion within stars, collisions between neutron stars, or stars undergoing supernova. All of the oxygen in the our bodies (65% of our mass) comes from exploding massive stars.

In his last broadcast interview, Stephen Hawking comments on detecting gravitational waves from the collision of neutron stars. The event may serve as a new means of measuring cosmological distances and help identify revisions to general relativity.

Referred to as "second sound," the flow of heat in a superfluid resembles a sound wave bouncing back and forth. The heat-mapping techniques used to make the detection may improve the study of neutron stars and superconductors.

Many heavy metals couldn't naturally occur within conditions on Earth. So how'd we get gold? See one theory posited by astrophysicists in this video, which involves two neutron stars crashing together.