Millimeter-tall 'Mountains' tagged posts

New models of neutron stars show that their tallest mountains may be only fractions of millimetres high, due to the huge gravity on the ultradense objects. The research is presented today at the National Astronomy Meeting 2021.

Neutron stars are some of the densest objects in the Universe: they weigh about as much as the Sun, yet measure only around 10km across, similar in size to a large city.

Because of their compactness, neutron stars have an enormous gravitational pull around a billion times stronger than the Earth. This squashes every feature on the surface to miniscule dimensions, and means that the stellar remnant is an almost perfect sphere.

Whilst they are billions of times smaller than on Earth, these def...