The Inside of a Neutron Star Looks Spookily Familiar - Issue 31: Stress
▻http://nautil.us/issue/31/stress/the-inside-of-a-neutron-star-looks-spookily-familiar
Hot fluids of neutrons that flow without friction, superconductors made of protons, and a solid crust built of exotic atoms—features like these make neutron stars some of the strangest objects we’ve found in the cosmos so far. They pack all the mass of a star into a sphere the size of a city, resulting in states of matter we just don’t have on Earth. And yet, despite their extreme weirdness, neutron stars contain a mishmash of vaguely familiar features, as if seen darkly through a funhouse mirror. One of the weirdest is the fact that deep inside a neutron star you can find a whole menu full of (nuclear) pasta.The forces and densities couldn’t be more different, yet the shapes that emerge are amazingly similar. The pasta is made of protons and neutrons, held together by the extreme (...)