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Warm pasta helps hot, angry neutron stars cool down - Livescience.com

Warm pasta helps hot, angry neutron stars cool down - Livescience.com

Warm pasta helps hot, angry neutron stars cool down - Livescience.com
Oct 16, 2020 1 min, 41 secs

Instead, neutron stars cool down by releasing ethereal particles known as neutrinos.

And the new study shows they accomplish that task thanks to an in-between type of matter known as nuclear pasta, a ripply, coiled material in which atoms almost, but don't quite, mush together.

This nuclear pasta structure creates low-density regions inside the stars, allowing neutrinos, and heat, a way out.

And while our sun, which is considered a yellow dwarf star, releases most of its heat in the form of light, light particles produced inside a neutron star rarely make it to the surface to escape.

6 in the journal Physical Review C, took a closer look at the matter inside neutron stars.

Ordinary stars are made up of conventional matter, or atoms: tiny balls of protons and neutrons surrounded by relatively huge whirling clouds of electrons.

The interiors of neutron stars, meanwhile, are so dense that atomic structure breaks down, creating a vast ocean of so-called nuclear matter.

Outside of neutron stars, nuclear matter refers to the stuff within atomic nuclei, dense balls of protons and neutrons.

Pasta is what lies between conventional matter and nuclear matter.

"Pasta is something intermediate between nuclear matter and conventional matter," said study co-author Charles Horowitz, a physicist at Illinois State University "If you start squeezing matter really, really hard in a neutron star, the nuclei get closer and closer together and eventually they start to touch," Horowitz told Live Science.

Scientists have known for most of the last decade that this pasta lies inside neutron stars, just beneath their crusts in the region where conventional matter transitions into bizarre, poorly-understood nuclear stuff.

And they also knew that neutrino emissions help cool neutron stars.

Simple models of neutron star emissions struggle to explain how nuclear matter could absorb enough momentum for neutrinos to escape.

The researchers showed that neutrino emissions from nuclear pasta are likely vastly more efficient than neutrino emissions at a neutron star's core

This research, Horowitz said, does suggest that neutron stars cool more slowly than expected

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