‘Overweight’ neutron star defies a black hole theory, say astronomers

Calculating the weight of a star is difficult, and the astronomer says the mystery object confounds theories.

The star was created by merging two smaller stars. Nuclear stars are usually so massive that they collapse into a black hole in a matter of seconds. The monster star was in view for more than a day before it was gone.

An astronomer at the University of Bath said that such a massive star with a long life expectancy is not normally thought of. It's a mystery why this one lasted so long.

The questions about the source of GRBs are raised by the observations. The most energetic events in the universe since the big bang were thought to have been launched from the poles of the black hole. The observed gamma-ray burst is thought to have come from the neutron star itself.

There is a sweet spot between stars and black holes for Neutron stars. A small amount of material would have a mass of 1 billion tons. They are 10 billion times stronger than steel.

Prof Mundell is an astronomer at the University of Bath and is one of the authors of the study. The only way we can study it is if they do something in the sky and we can see it.

Something seems to have prevented the star from figuring out how big it is. Something like how water stays inside a tilted bucket if it's swung around fast enough is possible because the star was spinning so fast.

This is the first glimpse that we may have of a spinning neutron star. I think we'll find more of them.

The initial gamma-ray burst was detected by the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, which is in the middle of the universe. The observatory in the Canary Islands automatically looked at the merger after it happened. There were telltale signs of a rapidly spinning neutron star.

The gamma-ray burst is thought to have been launched by the star itself. The exact sequence of events has been difficult to understand.

"We were excited to catch the very early optical light from the burst, something that is still largely impossible to do without using a robotic telescope." We may be able to find signals from hundreds of thousands of long-lived neutron stars before they collapse to become black holes thanks to our discovery.

The astronomer at the Brera Astronomy Observatory in Milan, who was not involved in the research, said that the team found evidence of a meta-stable hyper massive neutron star.

He said the work could provide new insights into the interior structure of neutron stars, which are assumed to have a core of exotic matter.

The results are published in a journal.