Neutron Stars: The Supranuclear-Density Zombies of the Cosmos

Our galaxy contains thousands of curious stars called neutron stars. Formed from the catastrophic collapse of massive stars, they are mind-blowingly compact, packing one to three solar masses of material into an object the size of a city. Gravity on a neutron star is 100 billion times as strong as on Earth, with atoms being crushed to form strange and unique types of nuclear matter. Neutron star magnetic fields can be a staggering 1,000 billion times as strong as a fridge magnet, and the fields spin so fast that their surfaces move at a good fraction of the speed of light.

In this Presidential Lecture, Anna Watts will explore how astrophysicists are starting to make sense of these weird and wonderful stars using everything from a tiny X-ray telescope on the International Space Station to some of the largest radio telescopes in the world.

Watts is a professor of high-energy astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam. She and her research group study neutron stars: the dense nuclear matter in their cores, the violent dynamical events that rock their surfaces and their ultra-strong magnetic fields. Born in the U.K., she earned a bachelor’s in physics at the University of Oxford and a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Southampton. She moved to the Netherlands in 2008 after postdoctoral fellowships at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany. While the move was ostensibly “for a couple of years,” she joined the faculty there and never left.