Neutron Stars – Giant Atomic Nuclei

Neutron stars are one of the most extreme and violent things in the Universe. They’re huge Atomic Nuclei with the size of a city but the mass of stars. They’re real because of the death of something beautiful. Stars exist because of a balance, gravity pushes very hard on the star which causes nuclei to fuse. Hydrogen turns into helium, which creates energy which in turn pushes against gravity. This balance is what keeps stars alive, eventually, the star will run out of Hydrogen. Medium stars such as our Sun become bigger and bigger until they turn into white dwarfs. In bigger stars, things get interesting when Hydrogen is exhausted. Gravity wins and the core starts burning hotter and hotter, the outer layer starts swelling and fusing heavier and heavier elements. Carbon burns to Neon in centuries, Neon to Oxygen in a year, Oxygen to Silicon in a few months, Silicon to Iron in a day. After that, because Iron can’t fuse so the fusion stops and the balance ends. Without the force of the fusion, the core gets crushed by the weight of the star. Electrons and Protons really don’t want to be near each other but the pressure of the collapsing star is so much that Electrons and Protons get squeezed into neutrons and that get squeezed as tightly as atomic nuclei. Gravity pulling the star inward at 25% the speed of light causes the implosion to bounce off the iron core and go off into space, this is what we call a Supernova. What remains is a Neutron Star, A Neutron Star has the mass of 10,00,000 Earths but it’s compressed to an object 25km wide. A Neutron Star is so dense that the mass of all the humans living on Earth would fit inside 1 millilitre of Neutron Star mass, that’s 100 crores (1 billion) tons of mass in the space of a sugar cube. A Neutron Star is beyond belief and its gravity is the strongest outside black holes, if it was any denser, it would become a black hole. Light is bent around it so you can see the front of it and parts of the back of it. Their surfaces reach 10 lakh degrees celsius and our sun only reaches a measly 6000 degrees Celsius on its surface. Let’s look inside a neutron star, although they are stars, in many ways their also like planets. They have a solid crust with a liquid core. The outermost layers are made from iron leftover from the supernova squeezed together in a crystal lattice with a sea of electron flowing through them. Going deeper, gravity squeezes nuclei closer and closer together, we find fewer and fewer protons because most merged with neutrons. At the base, nuclei are squeezed so hard that they start to touch. Protons and neutrons rearrange, making long cylinders or sheets, enormous nuclei with millions of protons and neutrons. Physicists call this nuclear pasta, nuclear pasta is so dense that it may be the strongest material in the universe. Lumps of pasta inside neutron stars can ever make mountains. Beneath the pasta, we reach the core. We don’t know what happens to matter when it is crushed so hard but Protons and neutrons may dissolve into quarks, a Quark-Gluon Plasma. Some of those quarks turn into strange quarks which have properties so strange that I will make another post just about those things, or they may just be neutrons and protons. No one knows for sure (That’s why science is fun). When a neutron star first collapses it starts spinning many times per second. This creates pulses because their magnetic beam creates a beam that passes every time they spin. Such Radio Pulsars are the best-known type of neutron star. About 2000 are known in the Milky Way. Neutron Stars are pretty amazing if you think about them! Bye!