Now, picking up where we left off, let’s talk about Neutron Stars. The second most dense and strange things in the universe, Neutron Stars are surpassed in their gravity and extremity only by Black Holes.
If you didn’t read part one, lemme break it down. Neutron Stars are the super compacted pure Iron cores of imploded giant stars. During the star’s last moments, it will crush it’s core from the size of a planet to the size of a city. Gravity fights the core to death, battling against stupendous amounts of heat and pressure produced by the shrinking Iron sphere. If gravity wins, the star collapses into a Black Hole, and if the core wins, a Neutron Star is born.
Neutron Stars are nuts, and that’s putting it lightly. Their surfaces reach almost 2 million degrees, and they have magnetic fields a quadrillion times as strong as Earth’s, earning them the name “Magnetars”. They also have so much gravity that light bends around them, so you can see both sides of it, and it’s so dense that atomic nuclei touch. (Y’know, atoms, the things that really don’t like being super close together? Well, they don’t have a choice in the bottom layers of the crust.)
Also, Neutron Stars are a bit more like planets than stars, with an atmosphere and crust, not just layers of plasma. Heading into the crust, we see that protons almost all merge into neutrons, and the atomic nuclei begin to touch, creating “Nuclear Pasta” as some scientists lovingly call it. The atoms become strands and sheets, massive atomic nuclei with thousands of protons and neutrons, and it is thought to be the densest material in the universe, almost indestructible and un-meltable. Since we can’t exactly look inside a Neutron Star, all these things are just theories. One of these theories is that the material in the core is so hot and condensed that protons and neutrons dissolve into an ocean of free quarks, called Quark-Gluon Plasma, or maybe atoms don’t dissolve and just become a really insane sphere of molten metal.Whatever the case, Neutron Stars are ridiculous, powerful, and beautiful.
Now, let’s make a Black Hole. Simple, just smash two Neutron Stars together. They will explode in a Kilonova, an explosion that rips out their guts and shoots them into space, creating most of the heavier elements in the universe like Gold, Platinum, and Uranium. Now we have a Black Hole, a monstrosity I will go over next week.
Credits:
The Wooshing King 