maximum mass of neutron stars tagged posts

Gravitational-wave emission from a collapsing star

Astrophysicists at Goethe University Frankfurt set a new limit for the maximum mass of neutron stars: It cannot exceed 2.16 solar masses. Since their discovery in the 1960s, scientists have sought to answer an important question: How massive can neutron stars actually become? By contrast to black holes, these stars cannot gain in mass arbitrarily; past a certain limit there is no physical force in nature that can counter their enormous gravitational force.

With a radius of about 12 km and a mass that can be twice as large as that of the sun, neutron stars are amongst the densest objects in the Universe, producing gravitational fields comparable to those of black holes. Whilst most neutron stars have a mass of around 1...