Neutron stars are almost perfect spheres. They owe this to their very strong gravity, which reduces any surface irregularity to tiny 'mountains' a few fractions of a millimeter high. They are in fact objects so dense that a teaspoon of the matter that constitutes them has a mass of about 1 billion tons, almost as much as 170 million elephants. çp indicate the models of neutron stars presented in Great Britain, at the National Astronomy Meeting 2021 and to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Created by the group of the British University of Southampton coordinated by Fabian Gittins, the model has reconstructed the characteristics of the surface of these stars so dense, even that they can have a mass comparable to that of the Sun, but a diameter of just ten kilometers. Due to their compactness, neutron stars exert an enormous gravitational pull, about 1 billion times stronger than Earth's.
“This aspect - the scholars specify - ensures that every surface feature of the star has tiny dimensions. For this reason, even minimal deformations on the small star, although they are billions of times smaller than on Earth, are similar to mountains. These results - they conclude - show how neutron stars are truly extraordinarily spherical objects, almost perfect spheres ”.
