Upon death, stars implode to concentrate their entire mass into very small volumes.
They then explode, outshining entire galaxies
and scattering the heavier elements across the universe.
If the star was massive enough, the concentrated mass becomes a black hole.
Otherwise, a neutron star is born as the less extreme counterpart.
Neutron stars are about a million times the mass of the Earth and have a diameter that’s approximately 25km.
They bend light around themselves, with a gravitational pull second only to black holes’,
allowing us to see their surface,
which has a temperature of about a million degrees Celsius
They also have a planet-like structure
At the lower levels of the crust, protons and electrons are so densely pushed together that they merge into neutrons
that are, in turn, squashed together so tightly to form “nuclear pasta”,
which is believed to be the strongest material in the universe.
As for the core, we’re unsure of what happens there!
Much like 85% of stars, most neutron stars are part of a binary system
where they orbit about a common center along with another celestial body.
If they partner with living stars, neutron stars draw
gaseous matter from their partner to their poles while heating them,
as they have magnetic fields that’re trillions of times stronger than Earth’s which emit electromagnetic pulses.
At extreme temperatures, this emits X-rays!
Alternatively, if they partner with another remnant of a dead star,
the combined gravitational pull causes extreme ripples across spacetime
and decays their orbit radius until they eventually kill each other,
collapsing into a black hole.
We can’t exactly see black holes, but what we can observe is
the last instances of light before being fully sucked into it,
the “Event Horizon”.
Once inside, you need to travel faster than light to escape!
However, you can get a little close while still having
a decent shot at escaping due to the “Ergospehere”,
a surrounding region outside the event horizon
that forces spacetime itself to co-rotate in a spherical shape.
At the epicenter of the black hole is the singularity!
Scientists don’t exactly know anything about it outside of what general relativity predicted.
But it is assumed that it’s infinitely dense with zero volume and surface area;
a single point of concentrated mass in spacetime.
However, there are many different, and more complex, iterations!
A star’s death leads to a black hole’s birth one way or another,
but what does a black hole’s death lead to?
Well, they actually evaporate through a process called Hawking radiation
where quantum fluctuations at the edge of a black hole cause
one virtual particle to be drawn into it and another to escape from it,
becoming a real particle, causing the black hole to lose mass,
and hence energy.
However, this process can take up to 10^91 times the age of the universe.
Hence, we really don’t know what happens as it never happened before.
It’s ironic how the most luminous celestial body may have been a few cubic centimeters away from being the darkest of them all,
where both are equally shrouded by countless mysteries.
We are sure, however, that most elements originated from neutron stars
and that black holes are what keeps galaxies held together.
Hence, we essentially owe it all to the death of the first star!
