Neutron stars are mysterious objects. What are they? How are they formed? How big are they? What are its characteristics? All this and more in this article. I will also be explaining pulsars in this article along with neutron stars. Please drop a comment if you liked it.
Neutron stars are made when a star that is at least ten times more massive than the sun explodes in a supernova. If the star was massive enough, a black hole would form. If it was not, a neutron star would form. This was explained more in the Black holes article. The core of a neutron star collapses, pushing all the electrons and protons to make a mass of neutrons, hence the name.
Neutron stars have a lot of gravity. So much so that if you dropped something 1 meter from the surface, it could accelerate to 900 million kmph. It sounds like a lot, but at the centre of a black hole, gravity is infinite. Since neutron stars have a lot of gravity, they are almost perfect spheres. The largest “mountains” on a neutron star can be roughly 5 mm high.
Neutron stars are also very dense. So dense, that if you took a teaspoon of neutron star matter it would weigh more than everyone on earth combined. If you took a football sized amount of neutron star matter, it would weigh about the same as Mount Everest. Neutron stars, however, are not very large. Their diameter is around 60 km, the size of a large town. The weight of a neutron star is around 1.3 to 2 times the mass of the sun.
A pulsar is a neutron star that rotates very fast and pulse radiation. Their magnetic fields are stronger than a neutron’s. These fields shoot out jets of particles from the poles. These can produce huge powerful beams of light, sometimes outshining galaxies. There is a pulsar 280 light years away. The radiation is very weak. So far, this is the nearest pulsar found.
Sources used-
· NASA (.gov)