Launched in 2017 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the US$62-million NICER telescope sits outside the space station and collects X-rays coming from pulsars - spinning neutron stars that radiate charged particles and energy in enormous columns that sweep around like beams from a lighthouse. “This is beginning to be a golden age of neutron-star physics,” says Jürgen Schaffner-Bielich, a theoretical physicist at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. With these combined observations, researchers are poised to zero in on what fills the innards of a neutron star.įor many in the field, these results mark a turning point in the study of some of the Universe’s most bewildering objects. Other data are coming in from gravitational-wave observatories, which can watch neutron stars contort as they crash together. The NICER team plans to release results about more stars in the next few months. Last December, this NASA space observatory provided astronomers with some of the most precise measurements ever made of a neutron star’s mass and radius 1, 2, as well as unexpected findings about its magnetic field 1, 3. Now, after decades of speculation, researchers are getting closer to solving the enigma, in part thanks to an instrument on the International Space Station called the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER). Others hypothesize that the incredible pressure compacts the material into more exotic particles or states that squish and deform in unusual ways. Some researchers theorize that neutrons might dominate all the way down to the centre. Yet exactly what happens afterwards, inside these ultra-dense cores, remains a mystery. Crushing internal pressure - enough to squeeze Mount Everest to the size of a sugar cube - fuses subatomic protons and electrons into neutrons.Īstronomers know that much about how neutron stars are born.
This core packs as much mass as two Suns and quickly shrinks to a sphere that would span the length of Manhattan.
Most of the stellar matter is thrown far and wide, but the star’s iron-filled heart remains behind. When a massive star dies in a supernova, the explosion is only the beginning of the end.
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