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One of the most extreme stars in the Milky Way has just gotten even weirder. Scientists have measured the mass of a neutron star named PSR J0952-0607, and found that it is the most massive neutron star ever discovered, registering 2.35 times the mass of the Sun. If true, this is very close to the theorized upper mass limit of about 2.3 solar masses for neutron stars, which is an excellent laboratory for studying these ultra-dense stars at what we think are on the verge of collapse, in hopes of better understanding. strange quantum states of the matter they are made of. “We know roughly how matter behaves at nuclear densities, such as in the nuclei of uranium atoms,” said astrophysicist Alex Filippenko of the University of California, Berkeley. “A neutron star is like one giant core, but when you have one and a half solar masses of this material, which is about 500,000 Earth masses of cores all stuck together, it’s not at all clear how they’re going to behav...

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 s...