Is there anything cooler than a neutron star in interstellar space?

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured an image of the super-dense neutron star at the heart of the famous Crab Nebula. The nebula resulted from one of the earliest supernovae to be recorded by human beings, and its striking form has made it a popular target for amateur and professional astronomers alike.

It is thought that a sugar cube-sized amount of an incredibly dense zombie stars such as the neutron star at the heart of the Crab Nebula would weigh the same as Mount Everest. What's more, neutron stars spin incredibly fast. The specimen lurking in the depths of the Crab Nebula is thought to rotate 30 times a second.

The neutron star itself can be observed as the upper right-hand star of the two brightest stars near the center of the image. The short video below zooms in from the constellation of Taurus to the inner parts of the Crab Nebula.

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Something so dense that a teaspoon of it weighs more than all cars in the United States combined.

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Now imagine the density of a black hole wherein a teaspoon weighs more than the continent of North America. One of the wonders of nature is that space is 99.999999+% empty of ordinary matter, making the limitations for density unfathomable.

At the same time, it's buzzing with particles of dark matter and dark energy that we can't yet detect but for which we have indirect evidence. Space itself is made up of exotic particles such as the recently discovered Higgs Boson.

The fascinating world of quantum physics promises to provide entertaining discoveries for many years to come.

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Dark energy and dark matter are confusing topics for me.

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They're confusing for everybody. We don't yet know what makes up Dark Matter or Dark Energy. Through gravity lensing and the rotations of galaxies, however, we know that Dark Matter is real and because the expansion of the Universe is speeding up we know that something, what we call Dark Energy, is causing it.

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The quantum world is even more confusing.

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The physics at the quantum level are counterintuitive, especially because we're so conditioned to the world of classical physics. However, we're using quantum physics more and more, even without completely understanding it.

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I doubt there will ever be a quantum theory for gravity.

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I agree. Even Einstein's General Theory of Relativity says that gravity isn't a force like electromagnetism, the weak force and the strong force.

Rather, and this is backed up more and more by modern physics, it's an effect of the relationship between spacetime and an object's mass. A large mass tends to warp spacetime and cause smaller objects to fall into it.

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String theory is not at all feasible.

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While String Theory (ST) is very strong on paper, it will remain only theory until we can directly or indirectly observe it. The basis of ST, "strings," are so much smaller than even the Planck size (the smallest size currently detectable) that we have no way of directly observing them.

Also, we don't currently know of a way to observe any direct effects of strings. That doesn't mean that we won't soon be able to prove ST, but for now it isn't possible.

And it's super cool, apparently. About 5 billion years ago it overwhelmed gravity and began forcing matter, and everything else that we can't yet detect, to expand away from everything else at an increasing rate.

This has led to a Universe that is about 93 billion light years in diameter and growing. There are already some parts of the Universe that we will never be able to see.

We're seeing portions of the Universe that, 1 billion years from now, will be beyond observation by anyone living then.

Absolutely mind-blowing. Love this stuff

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Basically, our current knowledge is so limited we don't even know what we don't know.

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Well, it's the nature of science that the answer to one question raises many more questions. However, human understanding of the quantum world is advancing at a blazing speed.

Using the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland/France and the gravity wave detectors in Louisiana/Washington, the Higgs Field and inflation of the early Universe have been proven in just the last two years. These are astounding scientific feats that would have rocked the world just a half century ago, on the same scale as development of the atomic bomb.

Today, though, there are so many discoveries coming so quickly that most people are not amazed even when something like the Higgs Boson is confirmed. The scientific community celebrates, of course, but today's technology is so complicated that the lay person seems not interested in keeping up with it.

What do you think about a planned trip to alpha centauri? It won't be a probe, it will be something very small that will get going by concentrating a laser on it from earth. I guess it is still a probe but a very small one. It will still take about 20 years to get there. I hope I'm still alive when it arrives there. That's 3 stars in that system to investigate. Stephen Hawking is very excited about it even though he won't live to see the mission succeed.

Okey dokey.

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Development of the technology for the mission has just begun

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Hope they figure out how to use the copy machine before they send it into space.

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Hope they figure out how to use the copy machine before they send it into space.

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Yes, it's a one-shot deal. That thing had better be working perfectly when it arrives at its destination at the L2 point in space.

It'll be 1 million miles from earth and there'll be no way for astronauts to get to it for service or repairs as they did with Hubble. The risk is worth it because of the expected pay-off, however.