One step to piercing the fabric of reality.

Have you ever wondered about the anatomy of a neutron star? You probably already know that it’s wrapped in an immensely dense crust a cubic centimeter of which would weigh as much as a small mountain on Earth, and that something akin to an atmosphere might be sloshing around the surface, periodically emitting death beams from its poles. But what about its innards? Since the deeper you go, the more exotic the matter would become, what could we expect in the extreme conditions in the cores of neutron stars? How do we describe the basic composition of one of these stellar cadavers? Well, according to a pair of new new studies, neutron stars are dense and crunchy on the outside with a liquid, superconducting center which forms when neutrons under extreme pressures behave like frictionless fluids. How do we know? Well, it seems that neutrons stars’ cores liquefy with age and as they do, they release a steady stream of neutrinos and cool these massive and turbulent cosmic corpses. The evidence for this theory comes from observations of a neutron star located at the center Cassiopeia A, a neutron star which mysteriously cooled by 800,000 degrees in just a decade.


[link to worldofweirdthings.com]