What do you think of this fact?
Take a teaspoon, fill it with material from a neutron star and put it on a scale. The scale would not survive. According to NASA, a single teaspoon of the stuff would weigh about a billion tons on Earth.
What is a neutron star?
A neutron star is what’s left of a massive star that exploded as a supernova at the end of its life. Its core collapses under its own gravity. What remains is a ball that can hold up to twice the mass of our Sun but measures only about 12 miles, or 20 kilometers, across. That’s roughly the size of a city.
The matter is squeezed so tightly that it’s made mostly of neutrons. Hence the name.
Mount Everest in a sugar cube
To make that density easier to picture, NASA offers a handy comparison: imagine squeezing all of Mount Everest into a sugar cube. That’s roughly how dense neutron star matter is.
Spinning extremists
As if that weren’t enough, many neutron stars spin ridiculously fast. Some rotate hundreds of times per second, faster than the blades of a household blender. The fastest one known, PSR J1748-2446ad, manages 716 rotations per second.
On top of that, NASA says their magnetic fields are trillions of times stronger than Earth’s. That makes neutron stars natural laboratories for conditions nobody could ever recreate on Earth.
To better understand this extreme matter, NASA sent an instrument called NICER to the International Space Station in 2017. It watches neutron stars from up there.
A spoonful that outweighs a mountain range: physics can be pretty absurd.