Have you ever thought about what actually happens when gravity crushes a dying star into a space the size of a city? It blows my mind that these neutron stars are so incredibly dense they literally crush protons and electrons together just to make a giant soup of neutrons. But what's even crazier is what might be hiding right at their very core. As pairs of these dead stars spiral into each other and finally merge, their immense gravitational tidal forces warp their shapes, sending ripples through spacetime. Scientists are now analyzing these gravitational waves to literally "see" inside the star. There is a huge chance that the pressure deep inside is so unimaginably high that even the neutrons themselves are crushed, creating a bizarre "quark core" - a completely exotic state of matter that hasn't existed since the very first moments right after the Big Bang. Imagine looking into the dark heart of a dead star and finding the exact same physics that birthed the entire universe! The cosmos is wild. #science #astronomy #education