A neutron star expends enormous amounts of energy for what is the burned out shell of a dead sun. The fastest neutron stars turn many times each second for thousands of years in their interstellar graves. Now a University of Chicago scientist and her collaborators have added faulting, starquakes and mountain building to the bizarre list of post-mortem behaviors exhibited by these inhabitants of the stellar graveyard. A magnetized neutron star suffers a starquake. The starquake creates a fault on the crust surface that begins at the equator and spreads towards the magnetic poles.
Matter moves along the faults from the equator to higher latitudes, forming mountains.
These mountains break the symmetry of the star, causing it to wobble. When the wobbling stops, the star's magnetic field will be tilted even farther away from its rotation axis causing an increase in the rate at which the star slows down. You're still moving matter and you're still forming mountains. The new starquake theory, motivated by more than three decades of data, appears to explain the mysterious rotational slowdowns that some of the best-observed neutron stars experience. Franco presented the theory last week at the centennial meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Chicago.