What is a neutron star? How is it formed?
Neutron stars is one of the most bizarre things and extreme and violent in the universe, the nuclei of a giant atom with a diameter of a few kilometers only, but heavy like stars, have emerged as a result of the death of a star majestic, according to the site " Science Alert " (ScienceAlert).
Neutron stars are one of the possible ends of massive, super-massive stars. When those stars explode in the form of a supernova, leaving behind a small, super-dense object, all of its mass - up to twice the mass of our sun - is compressed into a star about 15 km wide, or the size of a city on Planet Earth.
The secret of the glow around black holes and neutron stars
Neutron stars are so dense that a teaspoon of neutron star material can weigh more than a billion tons on Earth, which is more than Mount Everest, the highest mountain on Earth.
The mass of a typical neutron star is about 1.4 times the mass of our sun, considering that the diameter of our sun is about a hundred times the diameter of the Earth.
How are neutron stars formed?
Stars live their entire lives maintaining a very delicate balance between gravity squeezing inward and energy from nuclear fusion in the star's core spurting outward. This fusion "burning" is the process by which stars shine.
Gravity is trying to pull the mass of millions of billions of trillions of tons of plasma inward, compressing the materials with tremendous force to the point where the nuclei fuse with them, and the hydrogen fuses to turn into helium, and this in turn releases energy that rushes outward trying to escape against gravity. As long as this equilibrium exists, the stars are more or less stable.
And in a supernova explosion, in stars with a mass several times the mass of our sun, when the hydrogen runs out, the balance flips and the gravity that presses the star wins with even more force than before.
The speed and temperature of the penetration of the core double at a time when the outer layers of the star swell hundreds of times and fuse to form much heavier elements, carbon burns to turn into neon, neon turns into oxygen, oxygen into silicon, and silicon into iron, and here the star dies.
Iron is nuclear ash that has no energy to release and cannot be melted to form other elements. Here the fusion stops abruptly and the equilibrium ends. Without the outward pressure from fusion, the core would be crushed under the massive weight of the star above it.
An important breakthrough in how we can understand dead star collisions and the expansion of the Universe has been made by an international team, led by the University of East Anglia. They have discovered an unusual pulsar - one of deep space's magnetized spinning neutron-star 'lighthouses' that emits highly focused radio waves from its magnetic poles. The newly discovered pulsar (known as PSR J1913+1102) is part of a binary system - which means that it is locked in a fiercely tight orbit with another neutron star. Neutron stars are the dead stellar remnants of a supernova. They are made up of the most dense matter known - packing hundreds of thousands of times the Earth's mass into a sphere the size of a city.
In around half a billion years the two neutron stars will collide, releasing astonishing amounts of energy in the form of gravitational waves and light. But the newly discovered pulsar is unusual because the masses of its two neutron stars are quite different - with one far larger than the other. This asymmetric system gives scientists confidence that double neutron star mergers will provide vital clues about unsolved mysteries in astrophysics - including a more accurate determination of the expansion rate of the Universe, known as the Hubble constant. The discovery, published in the journal Nature, was made using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Source:Courtesy of Arecibo Observatory/University of Central Florida - William Gonzalez and Andy Torres. But the newly discovered pulsar is unusual because the masses of its two neutron stars are quite different - with one far larger than the other. This asymmetric system gives scientists confidence that double neutron star mergers will provide vital clues about unsolved mysteries in astrophysics - including a more accurate determination of the expansion rate of the Universe, known as the Hubble constant. The discovery, published in the journal Nature, was made using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Source:Courtesy of Arecibo Observatory/University of Central Florida - William Gonzalez and Andy Torres. But the newly discovered pulsar is unusual because the masses of its two neutron stars are quite different - with one far larger than the other.
This asymmetric system gives scientists confidence that double neutron star mergers will provide vital clues about unsolved mysteries in astrophysics - including a more accurate determination of the expansion rate of the Universe, known as the Hubble constant. The discovery, published in the journal Nature, was made using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Source:Courtesy of Arecibo Observatory/University of Central Florida - William Gonzalez and Andy Torres. This asymmetric system gives scientists confidence that double neutron star mergers will provide vital clues about unsolved mysteries in astrophysics - including a more accurate determination of the expansion rate of the Universe, known as the Hubble constant. The discovery, published in the journal Nature, was made using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Source:Courtesy of Arecibo Observatory/University of Central Florida - William Gonzalez and Andy Torres. This asymmetric system gives scientists confidence that double neutron star mergers will provide vital clues about unsolved mysteries in astrophysics - including a more accurate determination of the expansion rate of the Universe, known as the Hubble constant. The discovery, published in the journal Nature, was made using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Source:Courtesy of Arecibo Observatory/University of Central Florida - William Gonzalez and Andy Torres.Because neutron stars are so dense, they have intense gravitational and magnetic fields (University of Central Florida)
How did the neutron star get its name?
What happens next is quite frightening. The pressure of the collapsing star is so enormous that electrons and protons merge into neutrons, and thus the neutron star gets its name from its composition. Here, too, an iron ball the size of the Earth is compressed into a ball of purely nuclear material the size of a city.
But the collapse is not limited to the core, as the entire star collapses, as gravity pulls the outer layers inward at a speed equivalent to a quarter of the speed of light, and this collapse bounces off the iron core, resulting in a shock that explodes outward and throws the rest of the star into space.
This is called a supernova explosion, which outshines entire galaxies.
What remains of the star is now a neutron star, with a mass about a million times the mass of Earth but compressed into an object about 25 kilometers wide, so dense that all humans living on Earth can fit into one centimeter of neutron star matter.
Neutron star or black hole?
If, after the supernova phase, the star's core has a large enough mass, gravitational collapse will continue to form a black hole instead of a neutron star.
According to astrophysicists, the dividing line regarding mass between neutron stars and black holes is that the theoretical maximum mass for a neutron star occurs between about two solar masses, while the theoretical minimum mass for a black hole is one-fifth of the solar mass.
What nuclear pasta?
From the outside, a neutron star is unimaginably extreme. Its gravity is the strongest in the universe except for that of black holes, and light is bent around it, meaning you can see the front and parts of the back.
The temperature on its surface reaches one million degrees Celsius, compared to six thousand degrees Celsius for our humble Sun.
Inside a neutron star, although these giant atomic nuclei are stars, they are in many ways similar to planets by having a solid crust layer on top of the liquid nucleus.
At greater depths inside the neutron star, gravity presses on the nucleus stronger, reducing the protons, as most of them fuse into neutrons until we reach the base of the crust.
Here the nuclei are pressed together so tightly that they begin to touch and the protons and neutrons are rearranged to make long cylinders and plates, enormous nuclei with millions of protons and neutrons in the form of pasta and lasagna, which scientists call nuclear pasta.
Nuclear pasta is so dense that it may be the most powerful unbreakable substance in the universe.
A neutron star does not generate any light or heat of its own after its formation. Over millions of years, its latent heat will gradually cool from 1 million degrees Fahrenheit, eventually ending its life as the cold, dead remnant of a once glorious star.
Pulsars
When neutron stars initially collapse, they begin to rotate very quickly, and this creates pulsations because their magnetic field creates a beam of radio waves as they rotate rapidly.
And if a pulsar was pointed at our planet, we would see these beams sweep the Earth like the light that comes from a lighthouse at very regular and precise intervals.
In fact, neutron stars are the guardians of celestial time in the universe, their accuracy comparable to that of atomic clocks.These radio pulsars are the most famous type of neutron star. Two thousand stars are known in the Milky Way alone.Scientists believe that most neutron stars are either now or were once pulsars.
Although neutron stars have long been speculated in astrophysical theory, it was not until 1967 that the first of them were discovered by Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell.Since then, hundreds more of those stars have been discovered, including the famous pulsar in the heart of the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant that the Chinese saw exploding in 1054.
An artist's impression of the strong magnetic field neutron star in Swift J0243.6+6124 launching a jet. During the bright outburst event in which it was first discovered, the neutron star in Swift J0243.6+6124 was accreting at a very high rate, producing copious X-ray emission from the inner parts of the accretion disk. At the same time, the team detected radio emission with a sensitive radio telescope, the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in the USA. By studying how this radio emission changed with the X-rays, we could deduce that it came from fast-moving, narrowly-focused beams of material known as jets, seen here moving away from the neutron star magnetic poles. Source: Credit: ICRAR/University of Amsterdam.Most neutron stars are either now or were once pulsars (University of Amsterdam)
Magnetic stars
Because neutron stars are so dense, they have intense gravitational and magnetic fields, a neutron star that has an abnormally strong magnetic field is known as a magnetar, and is capable of pulling keys out of your pocket as far as the moon.
These magnetic fields are the strongest, estimated at a thousand billion times compared to the Earth after its birth. Thus, the surface of a neutron star is very smooth, as gravity does not allow for anything tall.
The place where gold is made
The best kind of neutron stars of all are neutron stars that can collide and kill each other in a kilonova explosion that ejects much of their contents.
These unimaginably violent neutron star collisions - one of which was discovered in 2017 by LIGO's gravitational-wave observatories (LIGO) called GW170817 - is also believed to be where heavy elements such as gold and platinum are formed. , since ordinary supernovae are not believed to generate the pressures and temperatures required for this.
To create these elements, the stars do not have to die once, but they must die twice.
Scientists estimate that there are more than 100 million neutron stars in our Milky Way. Although many of them will be old and cold, and therefore difficult to detect.
Tags:
BIODATA