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A habitable planet orbiting a neutron star must be between one and 10 times the mass of the Earth. If the planet were lighter, its atmosphere would be lost. Its atmosphere must also be thick enough to convert the intense X-ray radiation from the neutron star into heat on its surface allowing it to have a temperature suitable for life. [1]
A neutron star is so dense that one teaspoon (5 milliliters) of its material would have a mass over 5.5 × 10 12 kg, about 900 times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza. [b] The entire mass of the Earth at neutron star density would fit into a sphere 305 m in diameter, about the size of the Arecibo Telescope.
While Earth is the only place in the Universe known to harbor life, [10] [11] estimates of habitable zones around other stars, [12] [13] along with the discovery of thousands of exoplanets and new insights into the extreme habitats on Earth where organisms known as extremophiles live, suggest that there may be many more habitable places in the ...
[7] And indeed, the most massive neutron star detected so far, PSR J0952–0607, is estimated to be much heavier than Oppenheimer and Volkoff's TOV limit at 2.35 ± 0.17 M ☉. [8] [9] More realistic models of neutron stars that include baryon strong force repulsion predict a neutron star mass limit of 2.2 to 2.9 M ☉.
To this end, supercomputers are often employed to study black holes, gravitational waves, neutron stars and many other phenomena described by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. A currently active field of research in numerical relativity is the simulation of relativistic binaries and their associated gravitational waves.
Neutron star mergers are a recently discovered major source of elements produced in the r-process. When two neutron stars collide, a significant amount of neutron-rich matter may be ejected which then quickly forms heavy elements. Cosmic ray spallation is a process wherein cosmic rays impact nuclei and fragment them.
In a degenerate gas, all quantum states are filled up to the Fermi energy. Most stars are supported against their own gravitation by normal thermal gas pressure, while in white dwarf stars the supporting force comes from the degeneracy pressure of the electron gas in their interior. In neutron stars, the degenerate particles are neutrons.
Further advances were made, especially to nucleosynthesis by neutron capture of the elements heavier than iron, by Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge, William Alfred Fowler and Fred Hoyle in their famous 1957 B 2 FH paper, [3] which became one of the most heavily cited papers in astrophysics history. Stars evolve because of changes in their ...