I love me some neutron star *promote

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Saturday, September 6th, 2014 3:00pm PDT - promote requested by eric3579.

inner crust and outer core remind me of old Defrag progams...

Poor bird...

Degeneracy is really, really cool. It's all about squashing things into as tight a region of space as you can. It's an observable justification of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the Pauli exclusion principle (the one that says you can accurately measure the position or the velocity of an object but not both and the one that says that two neutrons -in this case- can't both occupy the same very small region of space).

To be a neutron star, the remnant core after an unstable giant blows its outer layers away has to be more massive than 1.44 solar masses, but anything bigger than about 2.5 solar masses probably becomes a black hole. On the less massive end you get white dwarfs which are prevented from shrinking any more by electron degeneracy pressure - electrons won't let the star get any denser. But if you throw more mass on it, even electron degeneracy pressure can't resist the gravitational force and you get a neutron star, supported by neutron degeneracy - the neutrons won't let the star get any denser now. And then finally more and more mass and it becomes a black hole, which is where even the neutron degeneracy pressure can't sustain the gravitational force.

I mean, that's fucking cool - there is so much gravitational force that the electrons have to team up with the protons to become neutrons, because neutrons can get slightly closer together. And then if the neutrons aren't happy, you've got a singularity which is a fancy way of saying we don't know what the hell just happened but stay away from it if you like being in the part of the physical universe that kinda makes sense to us.

There's also speculation of a quark degeneracy state beyond neutron degeneracy.

i hope most people notice the tardis in the neutron star

I'd like to see them do one of these for Magnetars:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar

"You're all just a bunch of degenerates."
"We are? But what about that time I found you naked with a bowl of Jell-O?"

2:52 - Stays to the right and leaves through the bottom.