They are so strange.
They are the leftovers of massive stars. The star's core is destroyed when it runs out of fuel. The explosion that created the supernova was caused by a complicated series of events. The nucleus will collapse if it is less than three times the mas of the Sun.
These can be packed tightly together, and when you have a lot of them, they will form a ball.
It's small. The density is ridiculous because of the mass crunched down into the ball. It is like taking every car in America and crushing them down so they are compressed into a cube. Roll that for something.
A typical neutron star has billions of times Earth's gravity. The magnetic field is so strong it can destroy a credit card stripe.
It is weird that we don't know how big they are.
It is important. A lot of their behavior is controlled by the size, so not knowing the size is a problem. For a long time, the best we could do was say they're around 10 - 15 kilometers away.
New research using a sophisticated combination of techniques has come to the conclusion that a typical neutron star has a radius of 12.01 0.78 kilometers.
There was a lot of information they needed to get to this number. There was a flash of light from a pair of colliding stars. The details of the explosion depend on the size of the stars that merged, so observations help constrain the sizes. There is a field of advanced physics called quantum chromodynamics, which can be used to calculate the size of a neutron star.
New to this work is the fact that the results of the high-energy particle accelerators can send gold nuclei slamming into each other at a mind-flensing speed. When that happens, the nuclei are subjected to the same pressures as inside a neutron star before they explode. Critical insight on the conditions of the nucleus can be gleaned from that shattering.
They get the 12.01 kilometer figure when they combine all this. This means what?
A similar calculation was done recently and got a slightly smaller number at the 90% level. They are not very different. The numbers should be noted. The old value could be as high as 11.0 and the new one could be as low as 0.78 We think they are consistent with each other. The two values are not wildly different if the uncertainties were lower.
If accepted at face value, the difference is about 8%. The gravity of the neutron star is stronger if it is small. When two of them collide, they can get very close before disrupting each other.
A black hole can rip apart a small star. The black hole swallows the star whole. If the star was bigger and ripped apart there would be a bright flash of light, something we could hope to see with a telescope. We can't see anything if the star just gets it. The light emitted from the event would help nail down a lot of the system's properties.
These predictions have consequences in the real world. At least for astronomy. We're trying to understand how the universe works. Humans value elements like strontium, Platinum, and gold, which are produced by colliding stars. Figuring out how they came to be is at least interesting and can help us find more secrets of the universe.
It has far-reaching ramifications when it comes to the size of neutron stars. We are zeroing in on it and we will get closer as more gold atoms are smashed.
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