A billion tonnes — that's one teaspoon of neutron star.
A billion tonnes — that's one teaspoon of neutron star. Not a bucketful. Not a kilogram. A single teaspoon, heavier than every mountain range on Earth combined. So what are these things? When a massive star runs out of fuel, it collapses in a supernova. The core gets crushed so violently that protons and electrons are forced together into neutrons, packing more mass than our entire Sun into a sphere roughly twenty kilometres across — about the width of a city. The gravity at the surface is billions of times stronger than what you feel right now. Some of these stars spin hundreds of times every second, sweeping out beams of radiation like a lighthouse. We call those pulsars. Ordinary physics simply stops working here. Follow Deep Field Vault for more of the universe's strangest corners.