Neutron stars are completely wild. Imagine a dead star the size of a large city, but packing more mass than our entire sun! The pressure inside is so intense that atoms are literally crushed into a dense soup of neutral neutrons. But here is the crazy part: as two neutron stars spiral toward an explosive merger, their intense gravitational tidal forces distort each other's shape. Scientists are now analyzing the gravitational waves from these tidal ripples to literally 'see' deep into their cores. And what's lurking at the center? They think it might be a 'quark core', an exotic state of extreme matter that hasn't existed in the universe since just after the Big Bang! We are basically looking inside the crushed remnants of a massive supernova to find the origins of the cosmos. Physics is absolutely mind-blowing! #science #astronomy #physics