The neutron star, 4600 light-years away, is twice as heavy as the sun, and 700k times heavier than Earth.
What’s more, it’s only 5 miles across!
Researchers are fascinated by the discovery because this much mass in such a small volume is getting close to the limits of how heavy an object can be without collapsing into a black hole.
Neutron stars are the remnants of the collapsed core of a giant star. A minimum mss is required for stars to qualify for the “giant” distinction.
If you’ve seen the movie Interstellar, you’re familiar with the distortion of time because of gravity. This time-dilatino could be an interesting topic to explore in a science-fiction story and brings to mind the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by Cixin Liu. If a probe was sent to study the mass, every second that passed for the probe would be vastly different from the timescale of an observer. This is currently beyond the scope of anything I’d wish to write due to the complexity of the calculations but it does seem like an outlaw would be willing to stay close by to a large mass in order to escape persecution, althought probably not as large a mass as this!
