“The largest neutron star ever measured” is twice the mass of the Sun and almost 700,000 times that of the Earth.
The team even said he was a star considered almost too tall to exist. The star is called J0740 + 6620, about 4600 light years from Earth.
This neutron star is the remnant of the supernova and is created when giant stars collapse in an explosion of almost unimaginable size.
One of the study’s co-authors, Maura McLaughlin, says neutron stars are as dense as black holes, which is very strange.
“We don’t know what they’re made of. Very strange materials that we just can’t create in a laboratory on Earth, ”says McLaughlin.
Maura McLaughlin and Duncan Lorimer previously used the Green Bank Telescope for research.
Professor Scott Ransom, one of the co-authors, notes that the orientation of the particular star system relative to the newly discovered neutron star has created “an amazing space laboratory.”
“Neutron stars have extremely powerful tipping points, to the point of overwhelming gravity. Determining that tipping point helps us understand the physics of matter at incredible densities,” Ransom says.
