Ever stopped to think about what is actually inside a neutron star? These are the wild, compacted corpses of massive stars that went supernova. We are talking about an object the size of a city but weighing more than our entire sun! The pressure is so unbelievable that atoms literally get crushed, smashing protons and electrons together into a soup of neutral neutrons. But here is where my mind gets blown: deep in the core, gravity might be so extreme that even neutrons get crushed. Scientists are now looking at gravitational waves sent out when two neutron stars spiral into each other and merge. The tidal forces before the crash distort their shapes, and by reading those ripples in space-time, we might prove they have a 'quark core', a bizarre state of matter not seen since fractions of a second after the Big Bang. It is absolutely crazy that we can basically observe the literal dawn of time hiding deep inside these dead stars! #science #astrophysics #education https://thoxt.com/l/jD2uVH 🔗