Astronomers have observed the most massive known example of an object called a neutron star.
The researchers said the neutron star, wildly spinning at 707 times per second, has a mass about 2.35 times greater than that of our sun, putting it perhaps at the maximum possible mass for such objects before they would collapse to form a black hole.
A black hole’s event horizon is the point of no return beyond which anything including light gets sucked in irretrievably. The neutron star, residing in our Milky Way galaxy in the direction of the constellation Sextans and formally named PSR J0952-0607, is located roughly 20,000 light years from Earth, Romani said. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles . The researchers studied it using the Keck I telescope in Hawaii.
It apparently was born with the usual mass of a neutron star, about 1.4 times that of our sun, but its gravitational pull poached material from its companion star, enabling it to grow to a mass seemingly at the uppermost limit before physics would dictate a collapse into a black hole, the densest of all known objects.
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