Scientists watch realtime ‘movie’ of neutron star explosion
Scientists in Canada and at NASA have captured unprecedented details of the swirling flow of gas hovering just a few miles from the surface of a neutron star, itself a sphere only about ten miles across. The researchers present this result in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. The observation provides new insight into the flow of a neutron star’s (and perhaps a black hole’s) “accretion disk,” usually far too minute to resolve with even the most powerful telescopes.