neutron star in supernova remnant

The night sky in neutrino light resembles a canvas worked on by two hands. One holds a broad, soft brush: these are supernova remnants, the shells left behind after stellar explosions. The other grips a fine, hard pen — microquasars, binary systems where a black hole twists matter into narrow jets.

When a star many times heavier than the Sun dies, it collapses and explodes as a supernova. This is not just a flash of light — the entire process, from core collapse to the ejection of the outer layers, makes space itself tremble. These ripples are called gravitational waves.

Deep inside a neutron star, matter is squeezed so tightly that familiar protons and neutrons give way to new players. Hyperons are born there — particles that harbor a strange quark.

The James Webb Space Telescope JWST has peered into the heart of supernova remnant SNR 0540-69.3 — what remains after a massive star died in a neighboring galaxy. Inside, amid the flying debris, astronomers saw a clear pattern: glowing clumps and voids arranged in a symmetric design.

Imagine a packed dance floor where dancers glide without any friction — passing through each other without a touch. That's a superfluid. In a neutron star's crust, neutrons could behave this way, but a rigid lattice of ions gets in the way, like suddenly sticking the dance floor full of pillars.

Neutrinos are almost elusive particles: they zip through planets without noticing atoms. So every catch is a stroke of luck. Recently, the underwater detector KM3NeT snagged a neutrino with energy millions of times greater than Earth's most powerful accelerators can produce.

The ASKAP radio telescope in Australia has spotted a very faint glowing ring in the southern sky, like a soap bubble the size of several full moons. Inside the ring, exactly at the center, shines a tiny point. Usually, such a picture means one thing: a star exploded here, leaving behind an expanding shell and a collapsed core at its heart. But this pair has a quirk.

When a heavy atomic nucleus splits, it doesn't break into even halves. First, two fragments form that look like pears pressed together at their narrow ends. Then the junction begins to smooth out, like two droplets merging and the surface quickly leveling. In that brief moment, the surface moves inward, and particles inside the nucleus can bounce off it, like a ball off an oncoming wall.

In a gas cloud left after a star exploded (called a supernova remnant), astronomers noticed a giant glowing letter S. It was drawn by two jets of superheated material ejected during the cataclysm. These jets didn't just shoot straight out — they slowly spun like a top, which bent their path into curves.

The Murchison meteorite, which fell in Australia in 1969, holds dust grains older than the Solar System. Among them are tiny graphite grains smaller than a thousandth of a millimeter. In five such grains, researchers found the isotope strontium-84: its atoms are slightly lighter than ordinary strontium.

A few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the universe resembled an endless dark ocean, shrouded in a thick fog of neutral (non-ionized) hydrogen. Then something dispersed the gloom: ultraviolet radiation knocked electrons out of atoms, making the gas as transparent as pure water.

Some stars fizzle out like a dud firework: instead of a bright blast, just a cloud of smoke. Usually, a massive star ends with a supernova explosion, leaving a black hole. But sometimes there's no bang: the star collapses straight into a black hole, almost unnoticed.