Neutron Stars: The Most Extreme Objects in the Universe (The Space Science Series)

A neutron star fits inside a city. It weighs more than the Sun. A teaspoon of its matter would weigh a billion tonnes on Earth. It spins hundreds of times per second, carries a magnetic field a trillion times stronger than anything in a human laboratory, and forges gold in the violence of its collisions.Neutron stars are the most extreme stable objects in the observable universe — and we have only just begun to understand them.In this gripping and authoritative account, Marcus Veylan traces the full story of neutron stars: from their theoretical prediction in a 1933 conference footnote, to the accidental discovery of pulsars by a PhD student who thought she might be receiving signals from an alien civilisation, to the extraordinary moment in August 2017 when two neutron stars collided 130 million light-years away and every major telescope on Earth pivoted to watch.Along the way, discover:Why a neutron star is essentially a giant atomic nucleus the size of LondonHow the fastest known pulsar spins 716 times per second — with its surface moving at a quarter of the speed of lightHow magnetars produce flares so powerful they have disturbed Earth's atmosphere from 50,000 light-years awayWhy every atom of gold on Earth was forged in a neutron star collision billions of years agoHow arrays of millisecond pulsars are being used as a galaxy-sized gravitational wave detectorWhat lies at the unknown centre of a neutron star — and why it may be a piece of the very early universe preserved to the present dayWritten for curious, intelligent readers with no prior physics background, Neutron Stars brings together nuclear physics, general relativity, gravitational wave astronomy, and the human stories of the scientists who built the field — in a book that illuminates one of the most astonishing corners of the physical universe.The Space Science Series — Book 4 Read more