Astronomers at West Virginia University have found the most massive neutron star ever recorded, located about 4,600 light-years from Earth.
The neutron star, which has been dubbed J0740+6620, is exceptionally dense — it’s about 2.17 times the mass of the sun packed into a sphere that’s only 15 miles across. For comparison, the sun is 333,000 times the mass of the Earth.
The researchers discovered J0740+6620 using the Green Bank Telescope in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. They published their findings on Monday, September 16, in the journal Nature Astronomy.
A neutron star is essentially what’s left behind after a star dies and goes supernova. After a star’s core collapses, the protons and electronics “melt” into one another and become neutrons.
“To visualize the mass of the neutron star discovered, a single sugar-cube worth of neutron-star material would weigh 100 million tons here on Earth, or about the same as the entire human population,” West Virginia University wrote in a post about the discovery on Phys.org.
Despite the groundbreaking nature of the discovery, the astronomers weren’t even looking to find an ultra-dense neutron star. Instead, they were on the hunt for gravitational waves emitted from pulsars.
That process is a bit complicated — scientists measure the mass of a neutron star using the “Shapiro Delay” phenomenon. Basically, the space around the star is warped due to its high gravitational pull. Pulses from a pulsar need to travel farther through that warped space, which takes them more time. That delay tells scientists how dense a neutron star is.
“These stars are very exotic,” said Maura McLaughlin, Eberly Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at West Virginia University. “We don’t know what they’re made of and one really important question is, ‘How massive can you make one of these stars?’ It has implications for very exotic material that we simply can’t create in a laboratory on Earth.”
Scientists have been able to use gravitational waves to make several discoveries about neutron stars recently, including a pair of them smashing together to create a massive “kilonova.” Scientists believe that a similar kilonova — one that happened about 4.6 billion years ago — might have been the source of gold and platinum on Earth.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.