Curiosity 7 of 10
7. A neutron star teaspoon would weigh billions of tons
A neutron star packs more mass than the Sun into a ball about 20 kilometers across. A teaspoon of this material would weigh, on Earth, a few billion tons.
What remains when a giant star dies
Neutron stars are born when a star many times larger than the Sun runs out of fuel and explodes as a supernova. The core left behind collapses on itself with such force that protons and electrons merge and become neutrons.
The result is one of the densest things in the Universe. A typical neutron star has about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun, squeezed into a size comparable to a city. The spoon calculation comes from here: five milliliters of this material would have a mass of billions of tons.
Many of them spin very fast and emit beams of radio waves, like a lighthouse. When the beam passes Earth, astronomers catch a regular pulse, and that is why these stars are called pulsars. The fastest ones spin hundreds of times per second.
The first pulsar was discovered in 1967 by astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell, then a graduate student in the United Kingdom. The signal was so regular that at first the team joked it might be a message from another civilization.
Did you know? The gravity at the surface of a neutron star is hundreds of billions of times stronger than Earth's. To escape it, you would need a speed of about one third the speed of light.
