Neutron Stars: The Supranuclear-Density Zombies of the Cosmos
- Speaker
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Anna Watts, Ph.D.Professor of High Energy Astrophysics, Universiteit van Amsterdam
The 2025 lecture series in physics is “Matter Under Pressure.” This series will investigate the fascinating behaviors of matter when subjected to extreme conditions. From the intense forces found in planetary cores to the violent dynamics of cosmic events, speakers will discuss how pressure can alter the physical and chemical properties of materials. The lectures will cover a range of topics, including the creation of new materials, the study of exotic states of matter in stars and the implications for understanding both Earth and exoplanetary environments.
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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.
About the Speaker
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.