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A type of WEIRD material found in ultra-dense objects such as neutron stars has been identified as the most powerful material in the universe.
According to new calculations, these "nuclear pulps" reach an incredible speed of 10 billion times stronger than steel.
"It's a crazy number, but the material is also very dense, which helps to make it stronger," said physicist Charles Horowitz, of Indiana University.
Neutron stars are thought to be formed in space by the gravitational collapse of massive stars.
Once the core of a star has burned, it collapses, compressing protons and electrons into neutrons and neutrinos.
"It's a crazy character"
Charles Horowitz, physicist at the University of Indiana
Although neutrinos escape, neutrons are densely packaged in an object located between 6 and 12 miles only.
This incredibly high density makes something odd to the nuclei of the star's atoms.
The density increases towards the center, compressing the nuclei until they deform and merge.
The resulting nuclear structures are thought to resemble pasta – hence the name – forming just inside the crust of the star.
Getty
POWER: "Nuclear pulp" is 10,000,000,000 stronger than steel
(Photo: Getty)
Some structures are flattened into sheets like lasagna, some are Bucatini tubes, some are spaghetti-like strands and others are heaps of gnocchi.
Their density is immense, more than 100 billion times that of water.
Although impossible to reproduce on Earth, scientists have succeeded in simulating the use of the most powerful computers in the world.
They created simulated nuclear pulp models and lobbied to see how the materials reacted.
They found that the force needed to break nuclear pulps was 10 billion times greater than the force needed to break the steel.
The researchers wrote, "Although the great strength and density of nuclear pulps predicted by this work suggest that neutron stars can withstand large" buried "mountains in the interior crust.
This means that because of these dense regions, the interior of the neutron star could be lumpy and irregular.
If this is the case, neutron stars can constantly generate gravitational waves – ripples in the tissue of space-time.
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