A Teaspoon of a Neutron Star Weighs Billions of Tons

The extreme density of a neutron star is the direct result of a massive star's violent death. When a star many times the mass of our Sun exhausts its nuclear fuel, it collapses under its own tremendous gravity, triggering a supernova explosion. While the outer layers are blasted into space, the core continues to collapse inward. The gravitational pressure is so immense that it overcomes the forces that keep atoms separate. Protons and electrons are crushed together to form a super-dense sea of tightly packed neutrons, eliminating nearly all the empty space that makes up normal matter.

This cataclysmic process crams the mass of one and a half suns into a sphere no wider than a city, creating one of the most bizarre objects in the universe. The material that results is so dense that a piece the size of a sugar cube would have the mass of a mountain. The gravity on a neutron star's surface is equally mind-boggling, over 200 billion times stronger than on Earth. This intense gravitational field is so powerful that it can bend the path of light, warping the very fabric of spacetime around it.