Neutron Star

Neutron Star at the heart of the Crab Nebula

    

    What if I say that there is an object in the universe where gravity is so strong that if you try to go near it, that not only your body but your atoms will be torn apart. This object, Neutron Star, is one of the possible outcomes of a dead star. A Neutron star is named after the subatomic particle, Neutron, which comprises it. After it was hypothesized in 1933 by Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky, the first observation was made in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell which confirmed it's existence.

First Neutron Star discovered

    When a star the size of more than 10 sun dies, goes supernova, the core of that star being massively dense, it collapses in on itself and even the atom gets torn apart and the subatomic particles like proton and electron combine to form a neutron (also you need to know that when a neutron decays it transforms into a proton, an electron, and an antineutrino, so the reverse is also true that proton and electron can combine to form neutron). When any other body reaches its vicinity, that body instantly transforms into a 1-dimensional.

    Fun Fact: If our sun was to be compressed to a point where it collapses into a neutron star, it would be only about 20 km in diameter. That's the size of a big city. But this small size and high density mean that even a spoonful of it would weigh 4 billion tons! That's a lot. And if the same should happen to earth, the diameter would be only 305 m. That's insane!

    Neutron stars have a very strong magnetic field which can be up to 100 million times that of the earth. Also, neutron stars rotate many times in a second which is wicked fast. Due to this high magnetic field, radiation is emitted from the two magnetic poles, and just like earth, some neutron star's magnetic poles, and rotating axis don't align and when they rotate the radiation beam looks like a lighthouse beam. Due to these pulses of light, these neutron stars are more commonly called Pulsars.

Pulsar star

    Neutron Stars mainly exist solo but in a rare case, a binary system exists with a star or with another neutron star. Neutron stars in binary can collide with each other to form a very big explosion that disturbs the space-time creating gravitational waves that can be detected on earth by LIGO Laboratory, confirming the General Theory of Relativity which was proposed by Albert Einstein a century back!