Record-Breaking Neutron Star Is Clue to Exotic Physics

[n2doc]

By Lisa Grossman October 27, 2010 | 2:45 pm | Categories: Space


A quick-spinning stellar corpse is the most massive of its kind ever seen. The dead star’s extra bulk could rule out several theories about what these dense stellar objects are made of — and provide a celestial lab to explore exotic matter.

“For people who work in this field, it’s huge,” said neutron-star astronomer M. Coleman Miller of the University of Maryland, who was not involved in the new Green Bank Telescope study. “It’s a big new addition to our information about a state of matter that we cannot explore in labs.”

Weighing in at twice the mass of the sun, the new heavyweight champ — a pulsar dubbed J1614-2230 — is 20 percent more massive than any previously measured star of its class.

Pulsars are a special type of neutron star — the dense remains of ordinary stars that exploded as supernovas — that sweep the sky with a lighthouse-like beam of radio waves as they spin. As these radio beams swish past Earth, the stars appear to “pulse” at extremely regular intervals.



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[Jim__]

1. To me, a neutron star sounds like a giant atomic nucleus - bound by gravity rather than the ....

normal nuclear binding (the strong force?).

The article says, given the latest data, neutron stars are composed entirely of neutrons and protons:

The bulky star rules out all but a few models for the composition of neutron stars. Rather than containing exotic particles, the stellar corpses are probably made of plain neutrons and protons.