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Asked by Haris_mehmood1223 to Emma, Alice on 4 Mar 2016. This question was also asked by humna_484, Nathan, EJH.13.
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Emma Dean answered on 4 Mar 2016:
A neutron star is formed after a star supernovas (dies and explodes). Then gravity squashes all the exploded material into a sphere much smaller than the original star, but it weighs nearly the same as our sun. The gravity is so strong, it forces electrons and protons together to make neutrons. Neutron stars are mostly made up of neutrons, so that is how they got their name. I like to think of them as giant atomic nuclei.
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Alice Harpole answered on 15 Mar 2016:
Pretty much what Emma said!
To try and put into perspective quite how dense they are: while they have a similar mass to the Sun, they have a radius of only about 10km, giving them a volume about 100,000,000,000,000 times smaller than the Sun. This means that if you took all the people on the Earth and squished us down so that we had a density similar to the average density of a neutron star, you’d be able to fit us all inside a cubic centimetre! It’s this extreme density that then causes their very strong gravity.
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