What is a Neutron Star? How It is formed
What is a Neutron Star.
A neutron star is a stellar remnant–a super-compressed object left over when stars with a mass between 1.4 and about 3 times the mass of our Sun exhaust their nuclear fuel and collapse inwards. The result is a condensed sphere of matter about 20 km across, with a gravitational field approximately 2 x 10^11 times stronger than that of Earth’s.
How Neutron Stars formed.
Neutron stars are formed when large stars run out of fuel and collapse inward on itself. The protons and electrons of atoms are forced together into neutrons. Since the star still has a lot of gravity, any additional material falling into the neutron star is super-accelerated by the gravity and turned into identical neutron material.
Just one teaspoon of a neutron star would have the mass of over 5 x 1012 kilograms. A neutron star actually has different layers. Astronomers think there’s an outer shell of atomic nuclei with electrons about 1 meter thick. Below this crust, you get nuclei with increasing numbers of neutrons. These would decay quickly on Earth, but the intense pressure of the gravity keeps them stable.
When neutron stars form, they maintain the momentum of the entire star, but now they’re just a few kilometers across. This causes them to spin at tremendous rates, sometimes as fast as hundreds of times a second.