Here's mine:
Big moment for the Saviour's Run and her crew. We found a neutron star! Unfortunately someone else has made it here before us (congratulations Cmdr Ritchie!). Neutron stars are created when giant stars go supernova. They're called neutron stars because they're composed mainly of neutrons. With neutron stars we're out of the realm of normal stellar evolution and quantum mechanics and that family of physics begin to become known.
Everything in the universe is drawn to everything else and really really wants to collapse. The reason you don't collapse into your chair and the centre of the Earth is the electrons in your butt are repelled by the electrons in the chair. The electrons in the chair are repelled by the electrons on the floor. And so on. This is regular physics and involve reasonably understood principles going back to the greeks rubbing amber rods and making people's hair stand on end and running away thinking it was funny.
Neutron stars are so tightly compacted that sort of physics doesn't work. As the star collapses electrons just sort of give up and combine with protons to form the neutrons (they have to come from somewhere). This is neutron degenerate pressure. It's like above but instead of electrons repelling now it's neutrons. It's why the pressure inside a neutron star is beyond anything we can imagine. The star pictured here is twice the mass of our sun, but far far smaller than our Earth. It's heavy.
Neutron stars can only be created by stars bigger than our sun. Our own yellow friend will eventually become a white dwarf.
From
The First Great Solo Expedition
