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Twice the mass of the sun Almost 700,000 times heavier than Earth. A team of researchers has discovered "the most massive neutron star ever measured", a star considered "almost too massive to exist".
The star, known as J0740 + 6620, is approximately 4600 light years from Earth and is only 5 miles wide, a measure that "approaches the limit at which an object can be massive and compact without crash into a black hole. "
"Neutron stars are as mysterious as they are fascinating," said Thankful Cromartie, a graduate student at the University of Virginia, in a statement. "These city-sized objects are essentially ginormal atomic nuclei, they are so gigantic that their interiors take on strange properties, find the maximum mass that physics and nature will allow us to learn a lot about this domain." otherwise inaccessible in astrophysics. "
Artist's view of the pulse of a massive neutron star delayed by the passage of a white dwarf star between the neutron star and the Earth. This phenomenon is known as "Shapiro delay". In essence, the gravity of the white dwarf star slightly distorts the space that surrounds it, according to Einstein's theory of general relativity. (Credit: SWNS)
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Neutron stars are the supersized remains of a supernova and are created when giant stars collapse into explosions of an almost unfathomable size. To put it in perspective, a single piece of sugar on J0740 + 6620, which is 2.17 times the mass of the Sun, would weigh about 100 million tonnes, about the same as the entire world population, according to the press release.
One of the co-authors of the study, Maura McLaughlin, said that neutron stars, which are almost as dense as black holes, are "very exotic".
"We do not know what they are made of and a very important question is:" How well can you make one of these stars? "This has implications for very exotic material that we simply can not create in a laboratory on Earth," McLaughlin said in a separate statement.
Maura McLaughlin and Duncan Lorimer of WVU use the Green Bank Observatory for research purposes. Here, McLaughlin and Lorimer stand at the top of the Green Bank telescope, which has enabled them to detect the most massive neutron star ever created. (CREDIT: Scott Lituchy / West Virginia University.)
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Neutron stars (also called pulsars) are also extremely hostile environments, subjected to extreme temperatures and favoring intense magnetic fields. They are also radioactive, which adds to the researchers' interest for them.
"When the ticking pulsar passes behind its white dwarf companion, there is a subtle delay (in the order of 10 million seconds) in the time of arrival of signals," says the release, adding that it is "Shapiro Delay."
Shapiro's delay is the delay between the time it takes for the radio waves to reach Earth and the time they pass in front of the pulsar, in part because of the white dwarf star distorting the space that l? 39, surrounds, as underlies the theory of general relativity Einstein. .
Professor Scott Ransom, one of the co-authors of the study, also noted that the orientation of the star system created "a fantastic cosmic laboratory".
"Neutron stars have this tipping point where their inner densities become so extreme that the force of gravity exceeds even the neutrons' ability to withstand another collapse," Ransom said in a statement. "Each of the most massive neutron stars we find brings us closer together to identify this tipping point and help us understand the physics of matter at these staggering densities."
The neutron star was originally identified by the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the research was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
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