Extreme Physics of Neutron Stars

Neutron stars are so dense that a single teaspoon of their material would weigh about

6 billion tons on Earth. That's the same weight as every single car on the

planet combined, fitting in a tiny spoon. These cosmic objects are the collapsed

cores of massive stars, crushed down to a sphere only about 20 kilometers across,

yet containing more mass than our entire sun. But here's where it gets even wilder.

When neutron stars spin, some of them become pulsars, rotating hundreds

of times per second while shooting beams of radiation into space like cosmic lighthouses.

The fastest pulsar ever discovered spins 716 times per second. Imagine something