Mamoru Matsuo

A hot spoon in a cup of tea — heat runs along the metal from the hot end to the cold one. Textbooks describe this process as atoms jiggling and passing on their jolts to each other. But atoms don't just jiggle: they also spin, like tiny tops. Until now, physicists had no common language to describe both motions at once. The authors of the work built such a language.

Inside a neutron star, matter is compressed so intensely that atomic nuclei fuse into long strands and flat sheets. Astrophysicists call these structures nuclear pasta. At their surface, the density of matter plummets to nearly zero, like diving out of thick jelly into thin air. It's this sharp transition that creates the unusual effect.