Pulsars

Imagine squeezing mount Everest into a small lump and dropping it into your cup of tea.

• Pulsars are highly magnetized rotating compact star that emits beams of electromagnetic radiation out of its magnetic poles.
• Pulsars are made  of neutrons packed tightly together, making them incredibly dense.
• A teaspoon of neutronium (neutron star material) would weigh five and a half trillion kilograms.
• Neutron stars aren’t proper stars but instead they are stellar mutant power zombies that began their lives when a massive stars explodes.
• Imagine a star literally dragging Space and Time around it. one of the Einstein’s prediction of general theory of relativity is that spinning body drags space-time around it (frame-dragging).
• The faster an object spins and the more massive it is, the more powerful the drag.
• The insane density of neutron stars create an equally insane gravitational pull, the surface gravity of neutrons are hundred billions times stronger than earth.
• forget about standing on one of these things to weigh yourself; you’d be instantly flattened into a thin film of quantum goo.
• A newly formed Neutron star  can spin up to a hundred times a second.
• this rotation sets up an insanely strong magnetic fields,
• Earths magnetic field is somewhere around 30 micro Tesla that’s 30 million of a Tesla – (unit of magnetism).
• The suns magnet field s around 0.007 Tesla.
• MRI machines generate fields of around 3 Tesla.
• A typical neutron star generates up to 100 million Tesla!.
• A neutron star at the moon’s distance would erase your credit cards, all the hard drives on earth would also be erased.
• The magnetic fields are so strong they become particle accelerators and launch beams of radiation along their magnetic poles. these poles are tilted with respect to the star’s  rotation, turning the star into a cosmic lighthouse.
• if the beam sweep across our line of sight we can detect them as repeating pulses of radiation, we call these types of neutron stars “pulsars”.
• General relativity is the foundation of modern gravitational theory, that explains the precise motion of the stars, planets and satellites and even the flow of time.
• The discovery of pulsars allowed astronomers to study an object never observed before, the neutron star. This kind of object is the only place where the behavior of matter at nuclear density can be observed.
• Pulsars have allowed a test of general relativity in conditions of an intense gravitational field.