Centauri's Thoughts

I found all this rather interesting:

A star 40 times the mass of the Sun collapsed to form a neutron star instead of a black hole, researchers said today.

When a massive star burns out, its outer layers crash down on the star’s core, creating a dense ball of matter from which nothing could escape. Scientists previously thought that when a massive star died and collapsed on itself, it had no choice but to create a black hole.

Now, new data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory suggests that massive stars have a little wiggle room, and sometime produces a neutron star instead.

“Our discovery shows that some of the most massive stars do not collapse to form black holes as predicted, but instead form neutron stars,” said study lead author Michael Muno of University California, Los Angeles.

Researchers discovered this neutron star, a dense neutron ball about 12 miles in diameter, in the midst of an extremely young cluster of stars. By estimating the age and mass of the other stars in the cluster, the scientists were able to determine that this neutron star’s parent was at least 40 times the mass of the Sun.

So many have gotten into heated arguments about black holes, and the collapse to an infinite point, where I had ALWAYS considered the fact of something just a little more dense than a neutron star could have an escape velocity faster than light (the real definition of a black hole).

The entire article is here