A neutron star is the collapsed core left behind when a massive star explodes as a supernova. With roughly the mass of the Sun packed into a sphere about twenty kilometers across, its matter is so dense that a sugar-cube-sized piece would weigh as much as a mountain. Neutron stars spin rapidly, carry titanic magnetic fields, and appear as pulsars and magnetars. When two of them collide they forge heavy elements like gold and platinum and ripple spacetime with gravitational waves.
Cosmology · Gravitational Waves · Black Holes
Theory assumed colliding compact objects settle into near-perfect circles before merging. Then astronomers reanalyzed a black hole swallowing a neutro...
Astrophysics · Neutron Stars · Nucleosynthesis
Every gold ring and platinum wire on Earth was forged in a collision so violent it shook spacetime. In 2017, astronomers watched two neutron stars mer...
Astrophysics · Neutron Stars · Pulsars
In 1967 a young researcher found a signal so regular it was half-jokingly labeled Little Green Men. It was a city-sized corpse of a star, spinning hun...
Astrophysics · Neutron Stars · Multi-messenger Astronomy
In August 2025, a faint gravitational tremor and a fading point of light arrived together from 1.3 billion light-years away. Astronomers had theorized...