Our readers agree that in the unlikely event you were able to approach a neutron star, it would look very smooth and bright ...

Neutron stars are incredibly dense, city-sized remnants of massive stars. They form after a supernova when gravity overcomes electron degeneracy pressure. Some neutron stars, called pulsars, emit ...

When a star the size of 20 suns dies, it becomes, in the words of astrophysicist Zaven Arzoumanian, “the most outrageous object that most people have never heard of”—a city-size body of improbable ...

Neutron stars are some of the weirdest cosmic objects, and the greatest mysteries lie deep in their hearts. Neutron stars' surface gravities are so intense that the largest "mountains" are only a few ...

When a massive star dies in a supernova, the explosion is only the beginning of the end. Most of the stellar matter is thrown far and wide, but the star’s iron-filled heart remains behind. This core ...

On August 17th, both the light and the gravitational wave signals from inspiraling-and-merging neutron stars reached Earth, where both were detected, for the first time, by humans. The inspiral phase ...

The core of a neutron star is such an extreme environment that physicists can’t agree on what happens inside. But a new space-based experiment — and a few more colliding neutron stars — should reveal ...

An international team of astronomers has concluded that when it comes to theories about colliding neutron stars, Einstein got it right. Everybody else, not so much. A neutron star is what's left when ...

Sirius A and B, a normal (Sun-like) star and a white dwarf star in a binary system. Many such systems like this are known to exist, and the accretion of matter from the star onto the white dwarf is ...

Astronomers witnessed for the first time ever a rare collision of two dense neutron stars. The discovery began with an instrument called LIGO, which won this year’s Nobel Prize for its discovery of ...