Neutron stars are the densest matter in the universe. Something as big a city has a much more compressed mass than the Sun. They have some weird consequences – including how smooth they are. New research suggests that the gravitational pull of such an object is so great and its crust is so hard that you won’t find “mountains” more than a millimeter on its surface. The results presented at the National Astronomical Summit 2021 came from new models that tried to create more realistic simulations to see neutron stars.
In particular, the team was interested in the smallest distortion of the surface of neutron stars – known as mountains, despite being subtractive – they determined that they were one times smaller than previously thought. Fabian Gittins, a graduate researcher at the University of Southampton and leader of the research team, said in a statement, “For the past two decades, there has been an interest in understanding how big these mountains could be before the neutron star’s crust broke, and this mountain can no longer be supported.”
The forces involved in these objects are truly mind-boggling. Imitations suggest that the surface of a neutron star is 10 billion times more rigid than steel. Previous models had suggested that these mountains could be up to a few centimeters long, suggesting that this crust was close to breaking at every point. The new work, however, argues that this assumption was not backed up by the physical reality scene. Neutrons are really smooth. If we rain a neutron star in the shape of the earth, these mountains will not be longer than half a meter (20 inches). You are not smoother than a neutron star.
“These results show how neutron stars are remarkably spherical objects. Also, they suggest that observing gravitational waves from rotating neutron stars may be more challenging than previously thought.” The material from which neutron stars are made is an incredible state of matter that is 100 trillion times smaller than any other material on Earth and is expected to be organized into a strange structure called atomic pasta. You have gonochi, spaghetti, waffles, and lasagna but also antigonochi and antispagiti.
