One teaspoon. One billion tonnes. One tiny star.
One teaspoon of neutron-star material would weigh roughly a billion tonnes on Earth. Not a billion grams. A billion tonnes. So what on Earth — or off it — produces something that dense?
When a massive star runs out of fuel, it collapses in a supernova. The core doesn't just shrink — it gets crushed so violently that protons and electrons are forced together into neutrons. What's left is a sphere about twenty kilometres across, barely the width of a city, yet packed with more mass than our entire Sun.
Surface gravity there runs billions of times stronger than what you feel standing on Earth. Some of these objects spin hundreds of times every second, sweeping out beams of radiation like a lighthouse — those are pulsars.
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