The Strongest Material in the Universe

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1:01take a large star that is about to go out and boil it until it goes supernova and explodes. You might need to wait for a billion years till it happens. So you'll need all the patience you've got. After the explosion, gather all leftover protons and electrons and vigorously stir them inside the star's shriveled core. Have they merged into a soup of immensely dense neutrons? Time to apply as much gravity as possible. Now, squash the stew into an airtight sphere, the size of Chicago, and cover the dish with a crystalline crust. Finally, heat it up to 1.08 million degrees Fahrenheit. What are you saying? It doesn't sound like a pasta recipe? That's because you've just made one of the strangest and strongest concoctions in the universe, nuclear pasta. For a few years, astrophysicists have been contemplating the idea of the existence of nuclear pasta. Such tangles of matter might be moving around inside neutron stars.

2:03Once a star becomes too old and massive, about four to eight times as big as our sun, it doesn't have any fuel left. The reactions in its core slow down and then stop completely. The star's outer layers try to collapse inward, but they bounce off the core, which remains incredibly dense. That's when everything but the star's core blasts out all over the universe in a bright supernova explosion. But that's not the end of the star. Even without the outer layers, its core keeps collapsing. At one point, the pressure inside becomes so great that electrons and protons melt into each other and form neutrons. The result of this crazy fusion is a neutron star, whose mass consists of 90% of neutrons. It means that the resulting space object just can't be squashed any tighter. Then, energy starts to leave the fading star, transforming it into a neutron star.

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4:03for the threats you can't control. Terms applied. That it can be compared with the combined light emitted by all the stars in the observable universe. Interestingly, neutron stars are relatively small. Even though scientists don't know for sure how big neutron stars can be, they suppose that these space bodies shouldn't be larger than 12 miles across. Nuclear pasta might be the only matter that can survive in a star after a supernova. And it may also be the strongest substance in the universe. In a new study, a team of scientists from the United States and Canada made several computer simulations, testing the potential strength of nuclear pasta based on everything we know about neutron stars and the conditions under which nuclear pasta is likely to form. The researchers determined that to shatter nuclear pasta, we'd need about 10 billion times the force needed to shatter steel. The incredible strength of nuclear pasta probably comes from its immense density. Nuclear pasta is believed to only exist

5:03inside neutron stars. And we've already spoken about how densely celestial objects are. To exist in such extreme conditions, everything inside a neutron star has to become way heavier than it would be anywhere else in the universe. In 2007, a NASA blog post even claimed that a sugar cube's worth of matter would weigh more than one billion tons inside a neutron star. That's roughly equal to the weight of Mount Everest. According to a new study, nuclear pasta might be so strong and densely packed that it could layer up and form small mountains, capable of lifting the crust of some neutron stars. As neutron stars rotate, and they can do it unbelievably quickly, these lumps on the surface of stars might theoretically produce ripples in the surrounding space time. Such ripples are also known as gravitational waves. This phenomenon was detected when two neutron stars collided. But it's still unknown whether nuclear pasta had anything to do with this unique gravitational outcome. Further research is definitely needed.

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