FWIS3

Just started reading about this. But it sounds like alot of information will be gained from the data. In other news, if I could just find a way to get two neutron stars to collide near me, I'd have all the gold I'd ever need.

Cool.

I totally knew about this a week or two back because one of the lead people on the first follow up is a postdoc in my institute! Who has been promptly offered a faculty position. Funny thing is this isn't even normally her focus, she works on rapid finding of supernovae and they were just in the right place at the right time.

Very exciting stuff!

My brain went "BOING!" when I read this

Two neutron stars, collapsed cores of stars so dense that a teaspoon of their matter would weigh 1 billion tons

A TEASPOON OF THIS SHIT WEIGHTS ONE BILLION TONS!

SciFiFisher wrote:My brain went "BOING!" when I read this

Two neutron stars, collapsed cores of stars so dense that a teaspoon of their matter would weigh 1 billion tons

A TEASPOON OF THIS SHIT WEIGHTS ONE BILLION TONS!

Sounds like some of the stuff I moved out of my garage over the weekend.

SciFiFisher wrote:My brain went "BOING!" when I read this

I believe the correct sound is "Spung!"

(Obscure? Yes, but I bet you get it anyway.)

And yeah, the amount of empty space in "solid" matter is kind of impressive. An atom's electron cloud is about 4 orders of magnitude larger than its nucleus. Neutronium isn't even degenerate matter like in a white dwarf star, where the electrons are squished into soup; it has the electrons crushed right into the nucleons to create overall neutral matter, basically a gigantic blob of atomic nucleus held together by gravity.

You can go denser, too. Quark matter would theoretically remove the barriers between nucleons. Not sure how the size scales compare for that though.

Edit: for extra weirdness, see also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_star