neutron stars tagged posts

A tightly wound-up magnetic field used as initial state in the simulation. Credit: K. Gourgouliatos, R. Hollerbach, U. Durham, U. Leeds

A study of the evolution of magnetic fields inside neutron stars shows that instabilities can create intense magnetic hot spots that survive for millions of years, even after the star’s overall magnetic field has decayed significantly. The results will be presented by Dr Konstantinos Gourgouliatos of Durham University at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science (EWASS) in Liverpool on Wednesday, 4th April.

When a massive star consumes its nuclear fuel and collapses under its own gravity in a supernova explosion, it can result in a neutron star. These very dense objects have a radius of about 10 kilometres and yet are 1...

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...

Artist’s depiction of a neutron star. Credit Credit: NASA

Astronomers like to say we are the byproducts of stars, stellar furnaces that long ago fused hydrogen and helium into the elements needed for life through the process of stellar nucleosynthesis. As the late Carl Sagan once put it: “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff.” But what about the heavier elements in the periodic chart, elements such as gold, platinum and uranium?

Astronomers believe most of these “r-process elements” – elements much heavier than iron – were created, either in the aftermath of the collapse of massive stars and the associated supernova explosions, or in the merging of b...

An artist’s impression of a millisecond pulsar and its companion. The pulsar (seen in blue with two radiation beams) is accreting material from its bloated red companion star and increasing its rotation rate. Astronomers have measured the orbital parameters of four millisecond pulsars in the globular cluster 47 Tuc and modeled their possible formation and evolution paths. Credit: European Space Agency & Francesco Ferraro (Bologna Astronomical Observatory)

When a star with a mass of roughly 10 solar masses finishes its life, it explodes as a supernova, leaving behind a neutron star as remnant “ash.” Neutron stars have masses of one-to-several suns but they are tiny in diameter, only tens of kilometers...