[ad_1]
Astronomers have discovered the most massive neutron star to date.
Nicknamed J0740 + 6620, the fast rotating pulsar packs 2.17 times the mass of our sun (330 000 times that of the Earth) in a sphere of only 15 kilometers in diameter.
This is about the limit of an object's ability to become massive and compact without crashing into a black hole, according to the University of West Virginia, which has contributed to the observation.
WVU researchers helped locate the star, some 4,600 light-years away from Earth, using the nearby Green Bank telescope.
Their findings were published this week in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Like most great discoveries, J0740 + 6620 is one of many fortuitous results, said Maura McLaughlin, professor of physics and astronomy.
"At Green Bank, we are trying to detect the gravitational waves of pulsars," which forces scientists to observe "a lot of pulsars in milliseconds," she continued. "This (discovery) is not a gravitational wave sensing paper, but one of the many important results that have emerged from our observations."
WVU physics teachers Maura McLaughlin (left) and Duncan Lorimer (right) work primarily with elementary students at the Green Bank Telescope's Pulsar Search Collaboratory (via Scott Lituchy / West Virginia University).
As Einstein's theory of general relativity explains, the gravity of a white dwarf companion star deforms the surrounding space, forcing pulsar vibrations to move further into the deformed space.
This delay tells scientists the mass of the white dwarf, which in turn provides a mass measurement of the neutron star.
In this case, this measurement is more than twice that of the Sun.
Think of it like this: a single piece of sugar made up of a neutron star would weigh 100 million tons on Earth, about the same as the entire human population.
Neutron stars are the compressed remains of massive stars that have disappeared into supernovae; they are created when giant stars die in supernovae and their nuclei collapse, causing the fusion of protons and electrons to form neutrons.
"These stars are very exotic," said McLaughlin. "We do not know what they are made of and a very important question is:" How good can you create one of these stars? "
"It has implications for very exotic material that we simply can not create in a laboratory on Earth," she added.
More on Geek.com:
[ad_2]
Source link