The sun at the center of our solar system is a big-bodied behemoth, clocking in at more than 4 nonillion pounds (in the U.S., that’s 4 followed by 30 zeros).
Now, multiply that mass by 2.14, and cram it down into a ball just 15 miles across. That’s an absurdly dense object, one almost too dense to exist. But the key word here is “almost”—because a team of astronomers has just found one such star.
The newly discovered cosmic improbability, reported today in the journal Nature Astronomy, is a neutron star called J0740+6620 that lurks 4,600 light-years from Earth. It’s the most massive neutron star ever detected, and is likely to remain a top contender for that title for some time: Much denser, researchers theorize, and it would collapse into a black hole.
Both neutron stars and black holes are stellar corpses—the leftover cores of stars that die in cataclysmic explosions called supernovae. The density of these remnants dictates their fate: The more mass that’s stuffed into a small space, the more likely a black hole will form.
Neutron stars are still ultra-dense, though, and astronomers don’t have a clear-cut understanding of how matter behaves within them. Extremely massive neutron stars like this one, which exist tantalizingly close to the black hole tipping point, could yield some answers, study author Thankful Cromartie, an astronomer at the University of Virginia, told Ryan F. Mandelbaum at Gizmodo.
“The orientation of this binary star system created a fantastic cosmic laboratory.”
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/massive-pulsar
Now, multiply that mass by 2.14, and cram it down into a ball just 15 miles across. That’s an absurdly dense object, one almost too dense to exist. But the key word here is “almost”—because a team of astronomers has just found one such star.
The newly discovered cosmic improbability, reported today in the journal Nature Astronomy, is a neutron star called J0740+6620 that lurks 4,600 light-years from Earth. It’s the most massive neutron star ever detected, and is likely to remain a top contender for that title for some time: Much denser, researchers theorize, and it would collapse into a black hole.
Both neutron stars and black holes are stellar corpses—the leftover cores of stars that die in cataclysmic explosions called supernovae. The density of these remnants dictates their fate: The more mass that’s stuffed into a small space, the more likely a black hole will form.
Neutron stars are still ultra-dense, though, and astronomers don’t have a clear-cut understanding of how matter behaves within them. Extremely massive neutron stars like this one, which exist tantalizingly close to the black hole tipping point, could yield some answers, study author Thankful Cromartie, an astronomer at the University of Virginia, told Ryan F. Mandelbaum at Gizmodo.
“The orientation of this binary star system created a fantastic cosmic laboratory.”
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/massive-pulsar
