ScienceAlert: A really weird form of matter found in ultradense objects such as neutron stars is looking like a good candidate for the strongest material in the Universe. According to new calculations, it clocks in at a massive 10 billion times stronger than steel.”This is a crazy-big figure,” physicist Charles Horowitz of Indiana University Bloomington told Science News, “but the material is also very, very dense, so that helps make it stronger.”
Neutron stars are one of the end points of the life cycle of a high-mass star. Once the core of a star has burned to iron, it collapses, squeezing the protons and electrons into neutrons and neutrinos.The neutrinos escape, but the neutrons are densely packed into an object between just 10 and 20 kilometres (6-12 miles) in diameter.
This incredibly high density does something strange to the nuclei of the atoms in the star. As you move closer and closer in towards the centre, the density increases, squishing and squeezing together the nuclei until they deform and fuse together.
The resulting nuclear structures are thought to resemble pasta – hence the name – forming just inside the star’s crust. Some structures are flattened into sheets like lasagna, some are bucatini tubes, some are spaghetti-like strands and others are gnocchi-esque clumps. Their density is immense, over 100 trillion times that of water.
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