What are neutron stars?

Question

people have told me different things about them and i am confused...

Answer 1

You can find more information at this source:

Answer 2

Burnt out stars with so much gravity that the repulsion between electrons and the protons in the nucleus is overcome and they combine into neutrons as the atom collapses. The star turns into a mass of neutrons with very little space in between, so it weighs thousands of tons per cubic inch. A neutron star with twice the mass of our 880,000 mile wide sun would only be a few miles across.

Answer 3

A neutron star is one of the few possible endpoints of stellar evolution. A neutron star is formed from the collapsed remnant of a massive star after a Type II, Type Ib, or Type Ic supernova.

A typical neutron star has a mass between 1.35 to about 2.1 solar masses, with a corresponding radius between 20 and 10 km (they shrink as their mass increases) — 30,000 to 70,000 times smaller than the Sun. Thus, neutron stars have densities of 8×1013 to 2×1015 g/cm³, about the density of an atomic nucleus.[1] Compact stars of less than 1.44 solar masses, the Chandrasekhar limit, are white dwarfs; above three to five solar masses (the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit), gravitational collapse occurs, inevitably producing a black hole.

Since a neutron star retains most of the angular momentum of its parent star but has only a tiny fraction of its parent's radius, the moment of inertia decreases sharply causing a rotational acceleration to a very high rotation speed, with one revolution taking anywhere from one seven-hundredth of a second to thirty seconds. The neutron star's compactness also gives it high surface gravity, 2×1011 to 3×1012 times stronger than that of Earth. One of the measures for the gravity is the escape velocity, the velocity needed for an object to escape from the gravitational field to infinite distance. For a neutron star, such velocities are typically 150,000 km/s, about 1/2 of the velocity of light. Conversely, matter falling onto the surface of a neutron star would strike the star also at 150,000 km/s.

Answer 4

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