Neutron Stars and Black Holes

Imagine something as small as Brooklyn, New York, but weighing more than 500,000 times the mass of Earth. That’s a neutron star!

A neutron star is what’s left when a massive star explodes in a supernova, leaving behind an incredibly dense core.

This core is made almost entirely of neutrons, tightly packed together.

Neutron stars are small, typically about 20 kilometers in diameter, yet have higher mass than the Sun.

Some neutron stars spin rapidly, emitting beams of radiation like cosmic lighthouses, and are called pulsars.

If the leftover core after a supernova has even higher mass, over three times the mass of the Sun, gravity crushes it further into a black hole.

Black holes are so dense that their gravity doesn’t let anything, not even light, escape. That’s why they appear black.

Even though we can’t see black holes directly, we know they’re there because they affect the objects around them. They pull in nearby stars, gas, and even light.

Neutron stars and black holes reveal the power of gravity in space.