Twice the mass of the Sun. Nearly 700,000 times heavier than Earth. A team of researchers has discovered the "most massive neutron star ever measured," one that is considered "almost too massive to exist."
The star, known as J0740+6620, is approximately 4,600 light-years from Earth and is only 5 miles across, a measurement that "approaches the limits of how massive and compact a single object can become without crushing itself down into a black hole."
"Neutron stars are as mysterious as they are fascinating," said Thankful Cromartie, a graduate student at the University of Virginia, in a statement. "These city-sized objects are essentially ginormous atomic nuclei. They are so massive that their interiors take on weird properties. Finding the maximum mass that physics and nature will allow can teach us a great deal about this otherwise inaccessible realm in astrophysics."
Neutron stars are the compressed remains of a supernova and are created when giant stars collapse in explosions of almost unfathomable size. To put it in perspective, a single sugar cube on J0740+6620, which is 2.17 times the mass of the Sun, would weigh approximately 100 million tons, or roughly that of the world's entire human population, according to the statement.
One of the study's co-authors, Maura McLaughlin, said that neutron stars, which are almost as dense as black holes, are "very exotic."
"We don't know what they're made of and one really important question is, 'How massive can you make one of these stars?' It has implications for very exotic material that we simply can't create in a laboratory on Earth," McLaughlin said in a separate statement.
This article is already published on https://www.foxnews.com/science/biggest-star-in-universe-discovered
This article is already published on https://www.foxnews.com/science/biggest-star-in-universe-discovered
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