Meet the Cosmic Tootsie Pop

Astronomers have found some pretty strange objects lurking deep in the universe—voracious black holes more massive than a billion suns, lonely planets wandering among the stars, galaxies made almost entirely of dark matter, and more. MoreNASA Is Using a Giant Laser to Transmit Videos From SpaceSPHERE’s First Image Looks Like The Eye Of SauronHillary Clinton Explains Why She Might Not Run NBC NewsMen Charged With Toppling Ancient Rock Formation Avoid Jail Time Huffington PostComet Outlives Predictions Weather.comBut what Emily Levesque found just beyond the edge of the Milky Way is arguably the strangest thing yet. “It’s bizarre,” says the University of Colorado, Boulder scientist. “It’s completely nuts.” Popular Among Subscribers No Soldier Left Behind Subscribe The Transgender Tipping PointThe Green Revolution Is HereThe nutty thing Levesque and three colleagues discovered looks like an ordinary red giant star, similar in appearance to Betelgeuse, which marks one of Orion’s shoulders. But nestled deep inside, like the yolk of an egg or the chocolate center of a hard-candy Tootsie Pop, is a neutron star—the super-dense remnant left behind when a star explodes. It is, she says, “unlike any star that we’ve ever seen.” Perhaps the craziest part of all is that theorists have been thinking about these weird objects for decades. It’s not all that unusual for two g...
Source: TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized astronomy Betelgeuse binary stars hybrid stars neutron star Orion red giant telescopes Source Type: news