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Sarafina Nance
@starstrickenSF
, 8 tweets, 2 min read Read on Twitter
AAAHHHH!!!

astronomers have detected the MOST massive neutron star ever detected!!!!!

AAAHHHHH!!

neutron stars are the compressed cores of massive stars that have exploded as supernovae. this one is about 2.14x the mass of our sun, but only 15miles across.

THIS IS SO COOL!!!
the way that they discovered the neutron star is just so freaking cool.

this neutron star is a special type: a pulsar. these have extreme magnetic fields which are several BILLION times that of the Earth’s.
these magnetic fields build up near the poles and align with the star’s rotational period, allowing us to observe these pulses and earn the moniker “pulsars”. (like a lighthouse!)

now, let’s go back to this discovery. this particular neutron star has a white dwarf companion star
here’s the really cool bit: because the white dwarf bends the fabric of spacetime due to its mass, *the light from the neutron star is gravitationally bent by the white dwarf companion star.*

that means that the “lighthouse pulses” from the neutron star are actually erratic!
that time delay allows astronomers to measure the mass of the white dwarf and the neutron star— making it the MOST MASSIVE ONE EVER DISCOVERED!
this discovery is especially cool because it helps us try to understand the structure of neutron stars.

up to now, we think the outer crust consists of ions/electrons, and the inner crust has electrons, neutrons, & nuclei.

but then it gets extremely weird.
the core is thought to be “nuclear pasta”— degenerate strange matter or a quark gluon plasma.

don’t ask me what that looks like because I have no clue ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

this discovery can help constrain the physics of the interior of neutron stars!!!
check out @HannahThankful’s amazing paper on this awesome discovery:
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More from @starstrickenSF see all

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Sarafina Nance
@starstrickenSF
how do stars shine?

somehow, particles reach forbidden regions. our model of classical physics says they shouldn’t be able to get there, yet, somehow, they do, via...

quantum tunneling.
let’s picture a really tall mountain.

in our classical model of physics, if you want to get to the other side of a mountain, you have to climb up, over, and back down. but if you don’t have enough energy, you can’t make the summit. (no circumventing allowed!)

(ya that’s me ⬇️)
if you can’t make the summit, you’ll either

A) turn around and to go back to your car (REFLECTION)

B) camp out on the mountain (ABSORPTION)

(also me ⬇️)
Read 10 tweets
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Sarafina Nance
@starstrickenSF
alright folks, buckle up. tonight I’m going to take you on a journey across the Cosmos, where we meet the brightest events in the Universe: relativistic space fireballs. (more formally known as gamma ray bursts (GRBs), but that’s a lil less fun.)
gamma ray bursts are thought to be produced by some of the most exotic phenomena in the Universe: core collapse supernovae, neutron-neutron star mergers, and neutron star-black hole mergers.
core collapse supernovae can produce two possibilities: (1) a magnetar, which is a rapidly rotating, highly magnetic neutron star; or (2) a hypernova, which is a superluminous supernova— an exploding star 10x as luminous as it’s standard counterpart.
Read 12 tweets
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Sarafina Nance
@starstrickenSF
decided to go out on a limb and make #SupernovaeSaturday a thing so I have an excuse to talk about supernovae all day 🙈. BUCKLE UP, GUYS.
so, we know supernovae are big and bright exploding stars. but what MAKES a star explode? do all stars explode? do all supernovae come from the same types of stars? what happens after they explode? well, lemme tELL ya: it’s..complicated.
some supernovae (SN) come from massive stars. HUGE. like, between 8x the mass of our Sun and >100x the mass of our Sun!!! can you imagine something that big?? (spoiler: I study them and I can’t. not really.)
Read 22 tweets

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Olaoluwa Aremo
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For the first time, #astronomers looking beyond our solar system have spotted water vapor in the atmosphere of a planet where temperatures might also be just right for life.
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JJ/ @RealScientists
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Phil Plait
@BadAstronomer
Astronomers have seen the aftermath of a star torn in half by a supermassive black hole.

The energy released was… quite large.

syfy.com/syfywire/astro…
I’m still having a hard time dealing with the energy of this event. Half the mass of that star was blasted away from the black hole at very nearly the speed of light.
And by “very nearly” I mean 99.5% of c. The energy that took is the about the same amount the Sun will emit OVER ITS ENTIRE LIFETIME.
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🦁 Leo C. Stein
@duetosymmetry
One cool bit of science you can learn from the #GravitationalWaves from neutron stars is about the "equation of state" of nuclear matter 1/?
this is something that simply can't be measured directly in labs or colliders on Earth. Astronomy is the only direct way to measure it. 2/?
How fast the inspiral happens encodes how "squishy" are the neutron stars. This is called the tidal deformability. 3/?
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