A neutron star is created when a massive star, 8 or higher times the mass of our sun exhausts its supply of hydrogen and can no longer maintain hydrostatic equilibrium. Stars are able to stay stable due to an opposition of forces. While gravity attempts to crush the star, this pressure also causes fuel to fuse into heavier elements and release energy. Subsequently, the central region of the star, or also known as the core, gets compressed by the entire weight of all the matter above it when all fuel fuses into iron, which is the final stage and cannot be fused into heavier elements.
This pressure is so great that protons and electrons fuse into neutrons and thus, what remains is called a neutron star is made from 95% neutrons and 5% protons.
Neutron stars are one of the most bizarre bodies in the universe. Their density is unmatched except for black holes of course, as one cubic centimeter of neutron star matter would be able to fit all 7.7 billion of Earth’s human inhabitants. All that matter compressed into the size roughly of a sugar cube. That’s a god damn lot of pressure.
The magnetic field of a neutron star can reach 1 billion gauss, or 1 quadrillion times stronger the magnetic field of the Earth. Neutron stars spin many times per second and can be observed from this. Pulses are created from their unmatched magnetic field in the form of radio waves. Neutron stars observed in this manner are the best known type of star, called a radio pulsar. Approximately, 2000 are known of in the Milky Way.
It has been recently discovered and confirmed that neutron star to neutron star collisions or kilonova explosions are the favored source of heavy elements such as gold, uranium and platinum. Regular stars can only fuse elements up to iron as conditions aren’t extreme enough and obviously the elements you are using to view this article came from somewhere .One of these explosions could produce up to 100 Earths’ worth of pure precious metals in an instant. Talk about efficiency.
Not only can these majestic stars be of interest and use to us but they could possibly uncover the origins and secrets of the universe. The environment in the core of a neutron star is so extreme that the rules of nuclear physics change.
The forces operating inside the core of a neutron star can be compared to the universe shortly after the big bang. This basically means that it can act as fossils from the beginning of the universe and time.
Quark are the true building blocks of the universe. They are only observed in confined groups, as singular quarks have not been studied. If you try to separate them, they resist harder and if energy is used, the quarks use the energy to make new quarks.
Frankfurt physicists begins, they simulated merging neutron stars and the product of the merger to explore the conditions under which a transition from hadrons to a quark-gluon plasma would take place and how this would affect the corresponding gravitational wave. The result: in a specific, late phase of the life of the merged object a phase transition to the quark-gluon plasma took place and left a clear and characteristic signature on the gravitational-wave signal. (Goethe-Universität, 2022.)
Professor Luciano Rezzolla from Goethe University is convinced: “Compared to previous simulations, we have discovered a new signature in the gravitational waves that is significantly clearer to detect. If this signature occurs in the gravitational waves that we will receive from future neutron-star mergers, we would have a clear evidence for the creation of quark-gluon plasma in the present universe.” (Goethe-Universität, 2022.)
A hypothesis is that inside the core, the conditions are so bizarre that quarks “deconfine” into a quark-gluon plasma. This plasma was the only matter to have existed in the first microseconds of the universe as it was also incredibly dense and hot.
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