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After a supernova explosion, a neutron star neutron star remains: a city-sized ball of unimaginably dense matter, spinning hundreds of times per second. Any tiny bump on its surface would make it wobble like an off-balance spinning top, humming faintly through the fabric of space. That hum is a gravitational wave gravitational wave — a ripple in spacetime spacetime predicted by Albert Einstein.
Astronomers tuned the LIGO detectors, created by scientists like Rainer Weiss, to 34 of these spinning stars, listening for their hum. After the most extensive search yet, they heard nothing.
The quiet is revelatory: the Crab star pours less than 0.04% of its rotational energy into gravitational waves. Extrapolate that smoothness across the cosmos, and these stars are rounder than any object we know. If we ever catch their faint whisper, it will open a window into the densest matter in the universe.
A teaspoon of neutron star stuff weighs about 10 billion tons, like packing Mount Everest into a sugar cube.
