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A team of astrophysicists recently used a new model of a neutron star to map the mountains – small areas that are uplifted – above it. Perfect ball structure for stars. They found that the largest deviation was still very small because small Strong gravitational pull, to less than a millimeter.
A neutron star is the dead core of a massive star that collapses in on itself. they They are the densest objects in the universe other than black holes. They are called neutron stars because their gravity is so strong that the electrons in their atoms collapsed in Protons, forming neutrons. It’s very compact They pack a larger mass than they are at Our sun is in a sphere no wider than a city.
Team’s assessment of “mountains” comes to these neutron stars النجوم two leaves Currently hosted on the arXiv prepress server; together, The newspaper assessed the extent of these mountains. The team’s findings were presented today at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomical Meeting.
“Over the last two decades, there has been a lot of interest in understanding how extensive these mountains were before the crust of the neutron star broke, and the mountain could no longer be supported,” said Fabian Gittens, an astrophysicist at the University of Southampton. . and lead author of both papers, at the Royal Astronomical Society الجمعية see press.
Previous work has shown the neutron star mountain can be several centimeters high – much larger than the latest team has. estimated. Previous calculations assumed that the neutron star would have a large bulge on its surface if it were Tense to the limit, like Atlas holding the world. But the newest model have found The previous calculations are the unrealistic behavior one would expect from a neutron star.
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“Over the past two decades, there has been great interest in understanding how extensive these mountains were before the crust of the neutron star broke, and the mountains could no longer be supported,” Gittens said in a statement.
Previous work suggested that neutron stars can tolerate deviations from the ideal sphere on the order of several parts in 1 . million, which means mountains can reach several centimeterss. This calculation assumes that the neutron star has been under such pressure that the Earth’s crust has almost collapsed at any point. However, The new model shows that such conditions are not possible.
“A neutron star has a liquid core, a flexible crust, and above all, a thin liquid ocean. Every region is complex, but let’s forget the finer details.” Nils Anderson, co-author on both papers and an astrophysicist at the University of Southampton, said, in a letter. “What we have done is build a model that connects these different regions together in the right way. This allows us to tell when and where the elastic crust first broke. The previous model assumes that the stress is maximum at all points at the same time and this leads (in our opinion) to very large mountains”.
This crustal growth means that energy from the mountains will be released into larger stellar regions, Anderson said. Anderson said that even if he relied on computer models, the crustal shift “wouldn’t be dramatic enough to cause the star to collapse, because the crustal region includes fairly low density material.”
Interesting questions remain. Anderson said it was possible that after the first crustal fault, mountains larger than the team designed could occur because That material flow through star surface. But even those mountains will be many Smaller than a hill, compressed by the massive gravity of the stars.
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