The Heaviest Neutron Star Ever Found Is The "Black Widow" Who Devoured Her Partner
A rotating neutron star periodically swings radio rays (green) and gamma rays (magenta) past Earth in this artist’s concept of a black widow pulsar. The pulsar heats the side of its stellar mate that faces twice as hot as the sun’s surface and slowly vaporizes it. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Cruz deWilde Observations of a planet-sized dim star helped weigh its pulsar companion milliseconds. A collapsing solid star has torn apart and consumed almost the entire mass of its companion star and, in the process, grew into the heaviest star. neutron star A neutron star is the collapsing core of a large star (between 10 and 29 solar masses). Neutron stars are the smallest and densest stars that have ever existed. Although neutron stars typically have a radius of only 10 – 20 kilometers (6 – 12 miles), they can have a mass of about 1.3 – 2.5 the mass of the Sun. ” data-gt-translate-attributes=”[{” attribute=””>neutron star observed to date. It is spinning at 707 times per s