neutron star
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These Violent Collisions Could Be Producing Dark Matter
A collision of two extraordinarily dense, collapsed stars in the distant universe is providing potential clues to the axion, a dark matter candidate first proposed half a century ago. The stellar remnants are neutron stars, the corpses that remain after massive stars collapse in on themselves. These dead stars are so dense that their electrons…
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Supposedly Dead ‘Tasmanian Devil’ Star Unexpectedly Whirls Back to Life
On September 7, 2022, the Zwicky Transient Facility detected a new transient object in deep space, about one billion light-years from Earth. The object was very bright, and now, a team of astronomers believes it’s a star that’s come back from the dead. The object was a star: a luminous fast blue optical transient, or…
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This Newly Discovered Neutron Star Might Light the Way for a Whole New Class of Stellar Object
The discovery of a neutron star emitting unusual radio signals is rewriting our understanding of these unique star systems. My colleagues and I (the MeerTRAP team) made the discovery when observing the Vela-X 1 region of the Milky Way about 1,300 light years away from Earth, using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. We…
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Astronomers Found an Ultra-Dense White Star the Size of Our Moon
Imagine a white-hot, dying star that contains more mass than our Sun packed into an orb just a little larger than our Moon. That’s ZTF J190132.9+145808.7, a record-setting white dwarf recently identified by astronomers.