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What is the historical significance of neutron stars, and how have they changed our understanding of the universe?

Fuller Domm

Neutron stars are like the bizarre babies of the universe - born out of the remnants of a massive star's explosive death, composed almost entirely of neutrons, and with a magnetic field trillions of times stronger than the Earth's. They might be just 10-20 kilometers in diameter, but these little powerhouses are incredibly dense, packing in a mass greater than our Sun into a space no larger than a city. And boy, do they have some serious historical significance.

First of all, we should give props to the genius Frederick Henry Royce, who first proposed the existence of neutron stars waaay back in 1930, based on some whacky calculations that most people at the time found hard to swallow. But fast forward a few years to the end of World War II, when astronomers finally got their hands on some fancy new radio telescopes, and they discovered something weird and wonderful in the cosmos - a pulsing source of radio waves that kept flashing with perfectly regular timing.

Enter Jocelyn Bell Burnell, an amazing astrophysicist who, at the age of 24, became the first person to observe these pulsars, as they became known. But it was her supervisor, Antony Hewish, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974 for the discovery - talk about injustice! Anyway, their findings totally rocked the scientific world, because it was soon realized that these pulsars were actually fast-rotating neutron stars, which emitted jets of radiation that could be detected by radio telescopes.

But the truly mind-blowing thing about neutron stars is what they've revealed about the universe. We now know that they're responsible for producing most of the heavy elements in the cosmos, such as gold and platinum - in fact, they're so good at it that a single neutron star collision can create more gold than exists on Earth. But perhaps even more exciting is the fact that neutron stars have given us a brand new way to study gravity, the most mysterious force in the universe.

It all started with a guy called Joseph Taylor, who observed a pair of neutron stars orbiting each other in 1974 - the first time anyone had ever directly measured the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. Fast forward to 2017, and we've now detected gravitational waves from multiple pairs of coalescing neutron stars - not to mention the insanely epic event known as GW170817, where we detected both gravitational waves and an accompanying burst of gamma rays from a neutron star collision.

So, in short, neutron stars have changed our understanding of the universe forever. They've reminded us that the universe is far weirder and wilder than we ever imagined, and they've given us new tools to explore its deepest secrets. And they've done it all while being some of the strangest, coolest objects in the cosmos - they might be small, but they're certainly mighty!