page_title: Neutron star
hierarchical_section_title: Neutron star
caption_attribution_description: English: October 23, 2014 Illusions in the Cosmic Clouds http://www.nasa.gov/wise/pia18848 Pareidolia is the psychological phenomenon where people see recognizable shapes in clouds, rock formations, or otherwise unrelated objects or data. There are many examples of this phenomenon on Earth and in space. When an image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory of PSR B1509-58 -- a spinning neutron star surrounded by a cloud of energetic particles --was released in 2009, it quickly gained attention because many saw a hand-like structure in the X-ray emission. In a new image of the system, X-rays from Chandra in gold are seen along with infrared data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope in red, green and blue. Pareidolia may strike again as some people report seeing a shape of a face in WISE's infrared data. What do you see? NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, also took a picture of the neutron star nebula in 2014, using higher-energy X-rays than Chandra. PSR B1509-58 is about 17,000 light-years from Earth. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the WISE mission for NASA. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program for. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, controls Chandra's science and flight operations.
context_page_description: A neutron star is a very small and dense star made almost completely of neutrons. They are small stars with a radius of about 11–11.5 kilometres. They have a mass of about twice that of the Sun. They are the smallest and densest stars known to exist in the Universe. They are what is left of a huge star which exploded as a supernova.
  The density of the star is like that of the nucleus of an atom. They have strong magnetic fields, between 10⁸ and 10¹⁵ times as strong as that of Earth. The gravitational field at the neutron star's surface is about 2×10¹¹ times stronger than on Earth.
  To imagine how dense a neutron star is, take all of the mass of our sun and push it down into a size that would fit into a ball with a 19 kilometres diameter. Another way to understand the density is this: one teaspoon of matter from the neutron star would weigh 6 billion tons.
  Neutron stars spin very fast, from 0.001 second up to 30 seconds to turn. They come in different types. They may emit beams of electromagnetic radiation as pulsars. Other types are magnetars and binary pulsars.
  They are more than 600,000 degrees Kelvin in temperature.
context_section_description: A neutron star is a very small and dense star made almost completely of neutrons. They are small stars with a radius of about 11–11.5 kilometres. They have a mass of about twice that of the Sun. They are the smallest and densest stars known to exist in the Universe. They are what is left of a huge star which exploded as a supernova. 
  The density of the star is like that of the nucleus of an atom. They have strong magnetic fields, between 10⁸ and 10¹⁵ times as strong as that of Earth. The gravitational field at the neutron star's surface is about 2×10¹¹ times stronger than on Earth.
  To imagine how dense a neutron star is, take all of the mass of our sun (which has a diameter of 1,392,000 kilometres (865,000 mi)) and push it down into a size that would fit into a ball with a 19 kilometres (12 mi) diameter. Another way to understand the density is this: one teaspoon of matter from the neutron star would weigh 6 billion tons.
  Neutron stars spin very fast, from 0.001 second up to 30 seconds to turn. They come in different types. They may emit beams of electromagnetic radiation as pulsars. Other types are magnetars and binary pulsars.
  They are more than 600,000 degrees Kelvin in temperature. Neutron stars that can be observed are very hot and typically have a surface temperature of around 600000 K.
caption: Radiation from the pulsar PSR B1509-58, a rapidly spinning neutron star, makes nearby gas glow in X-rays (gold, from Chandra) and illuminates the rest of the nebula, here seen in infrared (blue and red, from WISE)
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