• Question: What experiments would you want to do with a REAL neutron star?

    Asked by The_Real_Cortinz to Alice on 10 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Alice Harpole

      Alice Harpole answered on 10 Mar 2016:


      If I had access to a neutron star and could perform any experiment on it that I liked, then the thing I’d want to do most would be to cut it open and see what’s inside. We currently have very little idea of what goes on inside neutron stars, and believe there could be some really interesting physics there (most of which have rather great names) such as superfluidity, superconductivity, quark-gluon plasma and nuclear pasta. This kind of physics is very extreme and so difficult (or even impossible) for us to study on Earth. If we knew that these sorts of environments existed inside neutron stars, then this would tell us a lot about particle physics.

Comments