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A team of scientists has calculated the strength of the material deep within the crust of neutron stars and found it to be the most powerful material in the universe.
Postgraduate researcher Matthew Caplan at McGill University and his colleagues at Indiana University and the California Institute of Technology have successfully completed the largest computer simulations ever performed on neutron star crusts.
"The resistance of the neutron star crust, especially the bottom of the crust, is relevant to a large number of astrophysical problems, but it is not well understood," Caplan explains. .
Neutron stars are born after supernovas, an implosion that squeezes an object about the size of the sun to about the size of Montreal, making it "one hundred trillion times denser than anything on earth." Their immense gravity makes their outer layers frozen, making them similar to the earth with a thin crust enveloping a liquid core.
This high density has the effect that the material constituting the neutron star, known as nuclear pulps, has a unique structure. Below the crust, competing forces between protons and neutrons cause their assembly into shapes such as long cylinders or flat planes, known in the literature as "lasagna" and "spaghetti". Together, huge densities and strange shapes make nuclear pulps incredibly rigid.
Through their computer simulations, which required 2 million processor hours or the equivalent of 250 years on a laptop equipped with a single GPU, Caplan and his colleagues were able to stretch and distort the material in the crust of neutron stars.
"Our results are valuable to astronomers studying neutron stars, and their outer layer is the part we actually see, so we need to understand this to interpret the astronomical observations of these stars," Caplan adds.
The results, accepted for publication in Letters of physical examination, could help astrophysicists better understand gravitational waves like those detected last year when two neutron stars collided. Their new findings even suggest that solitary neutron stars could generate small gravitational waves.
"There is a lot of interesting physics here in extreme conditions, and understanding the physical properties of a neutron star is a way for scientists to test their theories and models," says Caplan. How can a big mountain build on a neutron star before the crust breaks and the crust collapses, what is it going to look like, and how can astronomers they observe it? "
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Material provided by McGill University. Note: Content can be changed for style and length.
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