What is a Neutron Star?

Another form that stars transform at their end is Neutron stars. They created when large massive stars die in supernovas and their cores collapse, with the protons and electrons melting into each other to form neutrons. Neutrino Stars are heavy mass stars that keep on fusing heavy and heavy elements until they end up at Iron. As I told you in Part 18, you cannot get energy out of fusing iron. The star collapse and electron combine with the proton to make neutrons.

Atoms As Big As Mountains

If a neutron star were any denser, it would collapse into a black hole and disappear. They are very dense 1.4 to 3 solar masses in a radius of 10 km. One spoonful of matter from a neutron star would weigh about a billion tons or more than the weight of many mountains on earth, and if we drop that spoonful matter on earth, it would pierce it and end up in its center. Just think of it, a spoonful of any matter on earth hardly weighs more than a few grams.

What is a Pulsar?

Now let’s discuss something about Pulsars. Neutron stars are considered to be the fastest spinning objects in the universe. Neutron stars sometimes become Pulsars as because of gravitational pull and angular momentum they start spinning so much so that they rotate as fast as 716 times/s. If you manage to stand on the equator of the fastest known pulsar, the rotational velocity would be about 1/10 the speed of light i.e almost 30000km/s.

They emit radiation light in beams. When first observed they were thought as LGM (Little Green Men) or Aliens, because they were emitting so fast and continuous sort of signal like some intelligent being was sending that. You can think of Neutrino star as hearing rather than seeing beams of light as the beams are in radio waves spectrum. But you could hear it exactly as a beep.